33-34 yo Drugs, Rape,Insaniety, Gay, GraduationDivorce, abortion,

I’ve woken again with the now familiar nightmare.  The psychedelic drowning with my mind moving about in it’s shell.  I’m quite afraid but not in panic. Just tired. The 3 am wakening. The memories.

The chronology of this time is confusing.

I remember her mother and her father fighting. He’s become violent. She’s again demanding her daughter’s total involvement.I ‘m a psychiatrist by now and call the ‘bluff’.  The constant alcoholic family drama and crisis have worn me down. My wife is in her final year of her residency but this constant loud distraction of her mother’s is a priority. I’ll be unfaithful after she graduates. After I throw the big party for her. After she gets angry about the gazebo insisting we can’t ‘afford’ one , after she’s taken the lowest paid academic job.  After she’s said she doesn’t want children and maybe we could adopt.

I drove over with her and took her mother to an apartment leaving her drunken father and drunken brother.  Problem solved. Yet, no.  The mother is now more depressed. Aparently safety and being out of the situation is not the solution.  She’s now even more of an issue for my wife. The mother’s chronic depression, hypochondriasis, drunken marriage, all of that is competing for centre stage as my wife is coming up to the finishing line of a good thing, her pediatric specialty. It’s all about the mother.  Alcoholism is like that. Untreated Al Anon’s are like that. But the whole family drinks and I drink. And as the stress of work increased the drinking increased a bit for us whereas for the mother she and her husband drank more along with the older brother who would soon die of liver disease from alcoholism

But my new friend is a woman doctor, quite the genius, from an amazing family. Yet she’s married the bad boy whose father is a schizophrenic criminal and whose family is even more bizarre than my in laws and definitely lower class to their middle class.  My friend’s family is if anything upper class. Class and education become a thing now because the boyfriend is a biker drug dealer and his attraction to the beautiful doctor with high intelligence is rather classic bad boy good girl dynamic. I’m of course studying all this at the time and treating families with wayward adolescents and paralleling my own life is this whole psychotic work life where the descriptions of the patients resonate with the friends and families outside of the psychiatry ward and psychiatry outpatients.  The walls between the two are grow thin.  

I have real difficulty with this time.  The final year of my residency. There’s the conference and infidelity. She’s teaching and I’m continuing to do my residency, work seeing patients in my basement, moon lighting  in the detox ,studying for exams, preparing for orals,and actually attending my first AA meeting because I am invited as a professor and am working with alcoholic families. It’s unusual.  I don’t think in a thousand years I’ll ever come to such a meeting as fellow sufferer. decades later I will.

I remember that there are these huge house parties that academics throw.I’m attending them occasionally by myself. I guess this may be after my ex and I separated.  I remember the big party I threw for her graduation and that there was no such celebration of my graduation. It was Maria Gomorri who convinced me to attend my final exam. I was going to leave.  I have a tendency to leave things that bother me.  

I had been fucked by my professor. I’d divulged to him my difficulties with my wife.  We were apparently working on staying together but she was furious and hurt and life was a mess. I was either at work with crazy people who were angry and wanting to kill me or at home with a wife who was angry and wanting to kill me.  

I was smoking dope. i remember hot knifing hashish because the biker friend had brought some in from Montreal. There’s a few of us. Now. I’m a good customer. He’s used his wife to access uptown markets. I introduce him to other faculty members.  

At this party in Tuxedo, millionaires and academia, there’s a girl passed out on the coats in the room for that. I come in to get my coat and this guy is about to rape her. He’s with his friend. Their pants are down. She’s drunk and trying to push him away feebly because she’s so out of it. I fight with this lawyer and his buddy and push them out of thee room then carry this woman out to my car. Her girlfriend comes with me bringing her fur coat. I drive them to her apartment in the Osborne area. It’s very uptown. I carry her into the bedroom and leave her with her girlfriend.  

The lawyer and businessmen from my high school are identified as serial rapists who have victimized dozens of young women using the new ‘date rape drug’.  I don’t even register that this is what has happened to this woman I’ve rescued but that her assaillants were another couple of predators. I’m just glad I stopped it.  

I’ve stopped dozens of women being raped having arrived to interrupt the attack. Weird. I remember an Indian woman being raped outside a bar and I walked across the street because she was screaming help and this guy was ripping off her dress.  They were both drunk. My car was parked nearby. Broad daylight. Winnipeg.  

“Would you like some assistance, “ I ask as she’s being punched in the side of the head and he’s ripping off her panties. It may seem strange that I’m so formal in these sitatuions but I am. I’m kind of like a Roger Moore OO7 character come to rescue.  There’s a funny movie of home made super hero’s and I identify. I discuss these situations with my psychiatrist. He eventually says, the insight, the bit I’m to reflect on , ‘you must be ‘scanning’ your environment for opportunities to rescue people. I think most people just don’t see what’s going on around them. They have their head down or are focused on where they’re going but you must be scanning your environment for an opportunity to help.”

I remember the woman drowning at the beach. There were hundreds watching. Only six of us went to assist. The lifeguard pulled her out of the water. I ran the length of the beach to help him pull her body out of the boat as he’d pulled her in and now was getting her out of the boat and I was helping with CPR. But there were hundreds of people and only 6 of us came to asssist him.  I’d run by them taking pictures, pointing out to the friend that there was drowning person, commenting on the lifeguard rescuing her.

“I’d rather be raped by an Indian than rescued by a white man,” she shouting at me spitting. At that time a half dozen other Indians stumbled out of the bar and I made my escape. They’d run a chain on her. I never know if she said that because she meant it or knew that this guy was one of a gang and that they would kill me if I interceded.  I just didn’t know but I left.

Now I’m avoiding talking about sex.  

I told my psychiatry supervisor, the professor, the clinical supervisor. “It’s all counter transference. You must tell me as it can affect your therapy patients.” He will abuse my trust. Use my information for his purpose. He is a narcissist at best, perhaps a sociopath but not a psychopath, thank God. 

So I open up and tell him about being raped as a teen by a man ,about the drugs , the betrayal by the band, the police and ‘good time Charlie’s back in town’ , about the first marriage. He told me it was terrible that the man had hurt me and that I shouldn’t have been hurt when I was penetrated.

 Someone who cared  would go slowly and caringly and heal all the pain of that time.”  It seemed like something odd at the time but only was something I thought of in retrospect when the mind wonders ‘why didn’t I see that coming....how could I have taken a different path...should I have taken a different path.”  

I’d go on to tell him  about my wife and the girl in Phoenix. I’d tell him how there’s no more  sex in the marriage any more, how lonely I was , how I’d given up everything ,being a country gp and flyin doctor to be a psychiatrist and now I didn’t know I wanted to be because my marriage didn’t make any sense and I didn’t like where we were going.  I felt trapped and desperate. I was so vunerable.   She was  constantly angry and I told him how depressed I was, how guilty I felt, how remorsefulremorse, and how I’d been seeing this psychiatrist for training but now all I knew was remorse.

Virginia Satir has come to town and we were attending a workshop.  She was doing all her human sculpturing and teaching us through ritual the positions of power. I was paired with my supervisor on stage and must sit before and below him.  

“I really liked when you were on your knees before me,” he said. 

“I liked the workshop,” I said. 

He was Jewish and had invited me to attend this weekly study of the tarot. It was Aleister Crawley and the demonic and we always drank and did drugs.  We’d go,  smoke dope and watch the slides and have a discussion of Alester Crowley and sexuality. It was very stimulating. .  There were followers of Crawley there.  He was into the demonic and drug use. Ironically my new friends the biker drug dealer would eventually tell me he too was a follower of Aleister Crowley. 

There was this whole ‘gnostic’ excitement. I felt invited into an inner circle of esoteric teaching by psychiatrists and psychiatric staff. I was studying psychiatry and attending this weekly seminar with a half dozen people from the psychiatry department. We were always smoking dope and drinking wine and it was intellectually very stimulating and fun. 

My work was thoroughly demanding and my home was depressing and these wonderful people invited me into their inner circle. One was an old lady who was a card reader and clairvoyant.  We’d talk about spirituality andspiritism  and the discussion of sexuality was free ranging as well. I was the youngest. 

I was deeply interested in spirituality and had been for ever. I was not meditating or doing prayer because I’d been told not to. I was ‘thinking’ and ‘overthinking’ and everything was related to everything. There was this huge fun insightful revelation of meanings in meanings and all this analysis. Analysis and analysis and analysis and jokes about analysis and comments about double entedre’s and lots of exhilarating insight into the unconscious.

I was no longer involved with Community Medicine because I was told I had to ‘choose’. I was always being manipulated. In retrospect I see this massive manipulation and how it was never about my “needs’ as a student but always about their “needs’ . They were always saying what they felt would be good for me but not ever how it would serve them. So of course I was taking extra call and doing others work and it was all their self sacrificing by letting me do their work.  I’d train in all this and realize how it was used in the workplace and it’s just all part of daily life but now I saw it.  Always there was a quality of you should ‘volunteer, but if you don’t you’d be failed in the residency.”

I had friends in the residency.  A beautiful colleague. She was getting all the same manipulation and disclosed that she’d had sex with her supervisor.  I didn’t register this.

A senior colleague told me that my professor was homosexual and that I should beware . He had a history of using the young staff men and students.  He had a overtly gay medical student as his companion frequently.  But I was in theatre. I wasn’t homophobic .  I had friends who were gay. I was married. HE was married. His Irish wife was divorcing him. I don’t know the reason but when I told him about my own marital problems he divulged his wife was cold and angry. “Irish, angry, unforgiving.”  

My mother was Irish and she sure was one to hold a grudge.

He was such a good man. So hard working. So spiritual. So loving to his daughters. His wife like my wife was so unsupportive. The women at the Aleister Crowley study nights were older but so sexually liberated.  So open in discussion , so avante  garde.

He invited me to attend a Jewish dinner. I think it was Passover. It was a central feature of his religion and he told me that I was being invited, ‘initiated’ into the very core of Judaic religion. He thought I would appreciate this. It was so spiritual. 

I went to dinner with his wife and children.  It was a wonderful evening.  The children participated in the ceremony. His wife was withdrawn and angry but they preceeded through this candlelight ritual. I think we had Matso ball soup. Maybe gefilte fish.

It was family. Warm and Rockwellian..

He invited me down stairs. We’d already drunk quite a bit and we smoked drugs.  “My cousin gets the best stuff. You’ll love this.”

I was catatonic after I’d shared a joint. He undressed me then.  I remember the most amazing sexual experience. I was frozen in moving, and he was all over me, pleasuring me in every way, massaging my body, licking me, fellating me, then he was in from behind, gently entering me.  It was surprising. Not painful.  Perhaps he had lube.  I know he was prepared. I was floating alsmost like a float room experience.

He kept saying, “I know you wanted this. You forced me to do this. You made me do this. You were so sexy. You wanted this. You made me do this”. Then he was pounding me from behind, his voice angry.

He was very angry at his wife. She was using the children as a weapon interefereing with his seeing them. They were separated.  He liked me to wear her lingerie so he could fuck me in their marriage bed.  I did as I was I told. I felt that my residency, more than three years of twining depended on my not angering him.

I enjoyed it all. Physically it was pleasurable. After it was over and he was sated I felt guilty and ashamed.I told him  that I just wanted to be friends, after that first time, 

“I just want to be friends. I don’t want a physical relationship”  I’d tell him every time and he’d just persist. A little wiry man who could destroy my career and reputation. The department was dominated by Jews. I now believed they all or most had been initiated this way. I didn’t want to look the fool, I just wanted it over. 

He’d describe homosexuality as the highest spiritual act and insist that my desire to be spiritual without being physical was the problem. That I must embrace my sexuality in my spiritulity. They were not separate.

I’d figure that this was what Jews did. This was the spirituality of Judaism. I’d also figure that my fellow residents were going through a similiar initiation into psychiatry. There was the woman being fucked by one of the other professors. I didn’t think hers was spiritual as much as romantic.

I felt I’d been so ignorant of this other adult mature level of reality and consciousness.  Was like doing drugs, feeling elite but dirty. 

Maureen had moved out with her mother. I was left in the house alone. This whole separation and her moving out had preceded the sex but it was all so overlapping, his divorce and her leaving and then I met my friend and musical mentor from years before. We’d talked over the years, having coffee in Osborne village. This night he told me he’d sold his guitar and was drunk and picked up a bottle and threw it at the mirror on the wall across the from counter.  I settled things down. I did that. I’d countless times especially with doctors out drinking paid for the damages and got them home in a taxi.

I brought my friend home and told him as he had no place to stay he could stay in my basement.  Maureen moved out. He smoked dope every day and I kept the refrigerator full and he said “every artist needed a patron’. 

But he taught me to play guitar while he was there. And the psychiatrist came over and I had my harmonium and tabala and we’d smoke ganja and play drums and make music and chant. It was all so very holy but after the artist went downstairs, the man would get angry and demand sex. He was always agitated while the artist was so mellow. Stoned I’d see them as a cross and a star. We’d be smoking Thai weed and I’d see them morph into the catholic and the Jew. I didn’t know what I was. I was some kind of Christian Hindu. I’d say years later I sold the house to get rid of the house guest. I’d not say it was because I no long felt my bed was safe. He’d drop in at all hours for his “booty call”. I’d wonder whether I’d have liked this if he didn’t hold power over me. I wished we’d elsewhere and elsewhen but I grew increasingly to realize I was more an object to him.

I loved these nights but I didn’t like the sex. I loved making music. I loved the discussions. Which isn’t true in a way because I loved being used or more, I loved not being in control. I loved that after years of pleasuring of my frigid withholding wife here was this person who was solely interested in pleasuring me.  And yet it wasn’t right and I felt wrong.  But I liked that I was receiving rather than feeling she was always taking and then I felt he was taking and no one cared that I said no. I’d talk to him about it and say that I didn’t like it. I told him over and over again I didn’t want to do it again but he’d just climb into my bed at night. Show up for his ‘booty call’ and I thought I was such a woman, complaining and yet participating. Saying no and doing yes.

It was all what I assumed the other residents were experiencing or at least those who were the best.  My friend was studying multiple personality disorder and I was fascinated with borderlines.  I had this sense that I was now ‘split’ , two persons. Animus and anima. I felt I’d become the animus and anima and that this man who was Simon to my Garfunckel was enlightening me. I was doing kundalini yoga exercises and felt my chakra opening and expanding. I felt his energy penetrating me, burning up my spine. I felt at times he was breeding demons in me, I would later wash for years. 

Later I’d read that great line about Bob Dylan, “Bob, how come you promise us girl’s you’ll make us princess’ and  we all end up feeling like whores.’

I’d stopped seeing my psychiatric psychotherapist. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to talk about my homosexuality. I felt forced gay and wondered why I didn’t just leave my residency, leave the university, leave the city, the country and go to Africa. But I stayed. 

The women fm the Alistair Crowley group asked me to come by and stopped me naked and had sex with me.It was a bit mechanical.  There was lust but I was depressed. I’d known love I thought with Maureen but that had just become nothing. Here was this other world of sex and drugs.  I was in the inner circle. I kept wondering which of the Jewish psychiatrists was a top and which was a bottom.  There was all this secrecy and I was told I wasn’t to know ‘yet’.  I’d ask always about judaism and Freud.  There were heady discussions but he wanted to ‘show’ our sexual relationship. I was ashamed of it. I wanted to be discrete but he’d touch my bum in the cafeteria. He’d try to fuck me on an elevator. We’d almost get caught and that thrilled him though it horrified me. 

Once we were supposed to just be going out to park and talk and next thing I was stoned and having my cock sucked and a policeman was at the window. This invigorated him and terrified me.  He was off on vacation coming back and telling me about his gay pursuits but it was increasingly just sex.

I was also feeling like my other friend was using me. I was giving him a place to stay and lending him thousands. The week of needing a place to stay became months. He wasn’t leaving.  Why would he. Don’t feed the raccoons.

I learned I had a problem saying ‘no’ to everyone . I was simply not assertive when it came to my personal space and relationships. Years later it would be a central issue of advanced therapy. I was repeatedly pushed into situations I didn’t want because I was afraid of the emotional extortion. I was afraid if I said ‘no’ to the emotional bullying by Maureen she’d leave me. I felt if I said ‘no’ to my professor he’d have me kicked out of my program.

I felt that I’d given up my general medicine, my northern medicine and my community medicine and my marriage, all to complete this psychiatry residency. I was in the last year and if I could just take it up the ass a few more times I’d pass. 

Mostly I felt that I’d worked so hard and had the highest grades and was the most admired resident, offered positions in all the university, yet now  it was reduced to my just being a ‘fuck’ .  I felt I’d never be thought of as having passed psychiatry on my own merit but that I’d passed because I’d sucked the supervisors’s cock.  

I’d become a bimbo.

I’d tell a friend years later about this feeling. My friends were psychologists and they’d say, “He bred you. He made you his bitch. That’s all it was a bout. Domination. You were the golden boy and he showed you. You were probably a fantasy aryan in his twisted perverted mind.” Women and men would all tell me their rape and date rape stories. All my friends had been used in someway. I identified with the women. I’d been reduced to a hole in the mattress, a number on an arm. I had no self esteem. I just wanted out. I only felt good stoned. I was down so low it felt like up to me.

I thought that. He hated his wife for what she was doing. I was Irish. I’d find myself in these weird ancient struggles. A catholic Irish doctor would fuck me over, not literally but figuratively, and I’d eventually learn he hated the ‘protestant Irish’.  “You’re family was never Irish. You’re British. .”  It never was an issue to me. The idea of being Irish only gained meaning years later when I went to Ireland.  I’d spend the next decades wondering about my sexuality.  I’d wonder as much about my identity.

I’d begin to drink more heavily , regularly a bottle of wine and now I was smoking dope a whole lot. He always had some from his cousin and my drug dealer biker friend was supplying me with it and my friend had his source. I was working two jobs and paying .

So here I was being fuckcd and not wanting to be fucked, this guy showing up and taking me somewhere to fuck me when I ‘just wanted to talk’ and me feeling like I was in this weird Bizarro movie.  My wife was not speaking to me having gone back to her mother.  I couldn’t say anything to my parents and I didn’t want to be ‘gay’.  I wasn’t gay.  But I didn’t think I wanted to be a pscyhiatrist any more because the other psychiatrists were gay.

I was offered a job by Dr. Nady El Guebaly and I took it. I became an assistant professor.  I had a clinical position as the head of family therapy at the teaching hospital. I became terrified.  

“Now we’ll be working together I can have you whenever I want you. I ‘m so looking forward to fucking you over lunch. You can suck my cock  between patients and we can really get it on all the time. “ he whisper to me in the hallways grabbing my crotch. I’d cringe. 

I was horrified.

I’d had a girlfriend for a few months but she said she was pregnant and I said we could have the baby but she said she wanted an abortion and I begged her to not but she went ahead anyway. I was devastated. She was Jewish. 

When I left the city he took that girlfriend as his own and told me she hated me now. He took the position of head of family therapy that had been created for me and now was vacated. 

We’d remain ‘friends’.  

I was supposedly ‘bisexual’.

My friends sister was beautiful.  I was visitting him in California smoking dope and drinking wine and he told me ‘don’t get involved with my sister.’ Her ex is a great guy but she just had a kid with him and then made his life miserable. She ‘s my sister and I love her but she’s a bitch. I dont want to see you hurt.”

I didn’t know what sex I was but I was a ‘slut’ and easy. She just had to take off her bra and I was to quote Paul Simon, “just like a dog who was befriended.’

St. Paul said, I do that which I don’t want to do and don’t do that which I want to do”  my own life was a reflection of my fundamental clinical concern.  I flew to India when I graduated, asked what I always wanted. I’d spend a couple of life changing months around Bombay, now sex with women, wanting to be sure I was okay but feeling somehow ‘impregnated”

I returned to Winnipeg just wanting to get away from the insaniety. I couldn’t go on with his desire. He was oblivious of my feelings and I felt like I was saying all the things women said. It wasn’t spiritual. It was just lust and lies and sordid.  After I went to California and came back to move ther  felt I was again with a loving woman and with friends. I would move to the US and leave this mess.  

My friends were multimillionaires. I was going to parties with world famous doctors. I just needed to do my exams.

I felt badly telling Dr. Nady I was leaving. I so admired him despite my colleague fucker disparaging him. My colleague lover fucker friend was brilliant in a different eccentric way and admirable in his own way and intellectual. I liked being fucked but I didn’t like being fucked. Especially when I compared that to the experience I had with the women which was transcndent by comparison. So deeply emotional and reassuring. Homosexual sex was a kind of advanced mutual masturbation whereas love and lust with women was something more. 

It’s was all just overwhelming and I was a bit paranoid with all these ‘witchy people’. He was so looking forward to my joining them and he’d touch my crotch or bum.  Some of the women on staff were telling me they were part of a coven and excited I was joining them. . The Alester Crawley reference was always coming up. I was reading a book given to me about Madame Blavatsky.  It all seemed secret and sordid. I felt like I was in a Rosemary’s Baby episode only somewhere.mn the line I’d deliver a demon. I’d d meet still occasionally with Carl Ridd or John White and they seemed lighter freer. I felt so dark and heavy. I needed the pot to get by and to get sodomized. I needed more and more to be drunk fo when he entered me.

I was however having wild crazy time. My biker friends had me on the back of their motorcycles when we’d careen about the streets of the city at high speed. I was dealing with lawyers with Maureen. My mother was incredible. I kept wanting to just walk away. She’d help with all the horrendous ‘paper’ and protect me. I felt safe with my parents but a disappointment, I avoided my brother and sister in law not wanting to bring my sordidness in to the joy of their growing family and love. 

“I still think Maureen is wonderful woman but I’ll never forgive you for letting that mother anywhere near us. She’s the nastiest person I’ve ever known. She’s so shallow and arrogant. I understand now everything you were going through but I don’t approve of any of it. You’re old enough to know better..”

Well, I went off and had a glass of wine and smoked a joint and left the mothers to fight over the dead carcas of a life.

One night I spent the whole night drinking a bottle of whisky and considering ways to kill myself while looking at the pink house and all our possession and that life which was now dead .All of this was  dead ‘stuff’. I threw the television at the wall. I thought everything was better when we’d kept it in the closet. I blamed the tv and all the propaganda and us watching movies all the time and the news. I blamed this and that. But in the end I blamed me. I didn’t kill myself.  The sun came up. I watched it. Winnipeg is a beautiful city at dawn. 

I had the Mustang. I ‘d driven down to San Francsisco to see my friend and his wife. I’d begun a love affair with his sister. She wanted me back. She said we would move in together. It seemed such a good solution. 

I traded my mustang in for money. The now ex had frozen my accounts and was taking all the money. I told my Mom I just wanted out. I said not to fight. She took the house and the possessions and the back account and I left in this beat up bug that had been used by the Vancouver Folk Festival as an amb ulance.  I was travelling south with a Mennonite artist. I’d named the bug, Pendergast. I’d been given tickets for speeding in the mustang and convinced the authorities that this bug couldn’t speed. It hardly made 80 and was without a hand brake so on hills I opened the door and put a brick under the front tire.  It had problems with hills. 

Still I had money for getting to SF.

“You can’t leave, I’m not finished with you.” Maureen had said. I’d  replaced. “I gave you 10 years of respectability and nothing was ever enough.”

We would never talk again. I’d done my best. It turned out to be the worst. 

The gazebo had been the last straw for me. I’d been working three jobs and all the money was going to her but I wanted to sit outside in the summer. I hated the mosquitoes. I had my garden and I barbecued outside. These were good times for me. Gazebos’ went on sale for $100 and I could have put one in the backyard but she’d said ‘we’re not having a gazebo’ .she put her foot down. More shouting. More anger. And in retrospect I expect she didn’t want the neighbours to hear her screaming. She’d begun to scream at me just like her mother screamed at her father. It’s an eerie thing.  

I never got a gazebo even though I had the house to myself for six months.  

With my new “love” rented a house in Marin.  I had a steady supply of pot. We all smoked pot back then and we drank wine. She went to work . I studied for my American exams and got A’s. Stanford offered me a job on the basis of Jack Hildes reference. 

“Dr. Hildes is greatly admired. That’s a great reference to have.” They told me. 

I was going to enter the community psychiatry program on staff .  I had made a friend of a Berkeley prof and he offered me a position teaching in their philosophy, communication and culture department, a new position, which would have involved psychiatric research in community psychiatry.  

Her  boy had been impossible. The first week I arrived I was at the principal’s office because he’d been destroying things.  He was violent and destructive and I’d not been told he’d been expelled from every school, seven in total. He was in Gr. 1.

I’d come to know that women no longer were interested in me as a friend but would almost invariably have a crazy person in their family and see having a boyfriend who was a psychiatrist as a cheap solution. I’d learn women with old cars liked mechanics. It was a different and difficult insight.

Now that I had been womanizer and bred I was softer and had more insights  identifying with women and understanding them differently.

I assumed this was why psychiatrists as part of their finial initiation had sex with the residents. I didn’t think mine was an unusual thing. I knew there were psychiatrists who just prescribed drugs and were kind of ‘junior neurologists’ but I figured the psychiatrists who like me were the psychiatric psychotherapists, the analytically trained, the inner circle who could do magic, these ones had sex. I found myself wondering who was having sex with who and who I’d have to have sex with. I didn’t want any more homosexuality.  I didn’t want it at work. I wondered if non Jewish psychiatrists went through the homosexual initiation or just the Jewish ones. I couldn’t imagine the Jews I so admired all being homosexual or even have sex with students. 

I was going to marry and raise this kid and hang out in Marin and have a good life. It was a full time job straightening out this kid. His mother used him as an emotional weapon. Her ‘inability to control him’ resulted in him making her the centre of attention. No one wanted her around. He was sexualized. What I’d call the single mother syndrome. Without a man to protect him from the mother she’d smothered him. She treated him like a boyfriend. I’d call it emotional incest. 

I became the boys friend, another uncle. I ‘d phone up his father , meet with him and tell him that I was ‘pinch hitting’ that I was not going to interfere with his fathering. I was going to continue to love his ex but that his relationship with his son was completely sacrosanct.  He was my friends friend and soon the three of us would be taking the  “little man’ everywhere with us. His mother didn’t like this.  “You’re ruining my son.”  Yet he stopped being kicked out of school and soon we were invited everywhere as a family. He was a great kid and no longer had temper tantrums when his mother was angry . He had stopped being her surrogate amplifier. 

That’s when the shit hit the fan. One day at this elegant affair I heard the mother and aunts and other important women telling her how pleased they were with her son’s behaviour “since Bill had come along.’  They actually said she was doing a lousy job of parenting because he’d been becoming a little terror.  They told her matter of factory the family had been going to insist he be sent to military school. However, now that “ Bill had smartened her up and let her son be little gentleman it was all thanks to Bill.  Feminists don’t like any praise going to men and single mothers demanding their be no other god but them aren’t likely to take well to being told by their very successful wealthy and powerful mothers the way things were. 

She was furious.  She was angry. Her son this little man of 7 years old suddenly through his old fashioned temper tantrum beginning to break dishes at the table. I picked him up and gently put him in his room.  That had been the ‘technique’ which had lead to his stopping all his acting out.  I’d simply remove the audience and remove him from the audience. I was highly effective while his mother had played the game ‘i’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do’ but refused to give up control.  She and he could ruin any event. He was a very bright boy and learned a lot of bad behaviour from her. 

I’d been called and offered a locum at the Brandon Mental Hospital. The provincial psychiatrist had called me because they were desperate with an asylum and no psychiatrist. Could I come for a month or two. I was to start at Stanford. I didn’t need this drama. I’d been through the insaneity with Maureen.

Now she took the boy out of the room and brought him back into the kitchen .  Splitting and using the poor kid to get back at me and her mother and all of society for wanting quiet and order. 

I phoned Manitoba.

“What are you doing.” 

“I’m taking the job I told you about.”

“You’re supposdd to be starting at Stanford.”

‘That can wait. I don’t want the kid screaming and your screaming and us going back to the way it was when I arrived. I told you I was never again going to sit in front of a principal again.. I’d done my own time as a child and I wasn’t going to do that for you again. Your son was doing great. That’s what your parents and grand parents and everyone said. He’s getting A’s at school.You’re angry so he’s angry but we agreed he’s not allowed to break things or he goes to his room. You’ve arbitrarily changed the rules and frankly I’m not going to do this again. The evidence is overwhelming. I think I’ve done my job here. You can think about it while I’m away.”

“No one leaves me.”

“I’m leaving you now.”

I got on a plane the next day.  We exchanged letters and calls for awhile 

Eventually I’d send her a bill for psychiatric services.  She didn’t like that. She never paid. My friend said that all the men who knew her thought that was genius. True coup d’tat. “ But my mother and she will never forgive you. The boys doing well and his father thanks you.”

Beautiful, The Carole King Musical, Steven Sondheim Theatre, New York City

Laura said this was the best thing she’d ever seen. It would be her greatest memory of New York.  We certainly did love it.
“I thought it would be Carole King herself playing piano or something. I didn’t realize it would be all this, the Shirelles, the Drifters, all the songs of my childhood, and all the dance, drama and song….I just didn’t realize how good it would be.” she said.
I was crying. I don’t know what came over me but every one of Carole King’s songs took me back to the 60’s , my teen years, the idealism, the spirit of immortality,  the first love, the belief in everything, Mom and Dad, family, struggling.  I loved the Carole King story. Living with her mother and her sister, in New York,  making her first songs at 16. Girl songs.  The ‘factory’ for music.  The friendships with lyricists and musicians.  The great combinations of that time.  Writing songs as a job.
I never knew that Carole King wrote all those songs with her husband Gerry Goffin. My Carole King started with Tapestry but there was she was one writing the songs before the Beatles.  Back then we just bought the 45’s and played them over and over again.  I didn’t know her friends Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann wrote the songs they did. I loved the history. I loved the parallel intertwining stories and remembered the friendships I had in those later teen, early 20’s times.  I looked around at the theatre and it was amazing how many of us had white hair.  Also how many of us had tears.  Some of it was laughter. The musical sure had some really funny parts but mostly  it was nostalgia.  It was an era. It was a musical for an era.
The divorce got me. I divorced and she was a beautiful woman too. Maybe the script is determined. Maybe there was no way to dodge the bullet. Maybe all that guilt and beating oneself up and all the comparisons and lack of forgiveness was for naught.  Gerry Goffin and Carole King had two kids.  All I was given was abortions.  There’s hope with children. If not this generation then maybe the next.  Carole King’s was a girl story.  That’s what Don Kirshner kept telling her ‘girl songs sell’.  Girl stories sell.
I loved hearing the Righteous Brothers. It took me right back to my first sock hop in junior high school.  I remembered my first kiss and the touch of her soft skin and the belief that she would always love me.  Cuckolded isn’t cool but then no one feels like we did back then.  It was normal to feel suicidal.  Teen songs were about suicide.  Romeo and Juliet.  But today who knows.  I see the meth addicts. The 20 year olds into drugs and overdose. Today there seems to be more sensation seeking whereas back then we believed we’d find God in erotic love.  I thought agape was to be found in the next kiss.
But drugs were such a large part of the Carole King story, not her but those around her. A regular Al Anon meeting place.  A whole group of untreated addictions.  The music industry.  Art of the injured.  I read an article of the great girls of the day, Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon, all of them chosing heroin addicts or alcoholics and the whole good girl bad girl lie thing.  The girl songs and the girl stories.  The Blame Game. That was there but I’ve always beat myself up. I’m the first one to say I’m wrong but then I’ve walked away to. And I felt so sad watching Gerry Goffin talking about the apartment prison.  Girl emotions can be so loud. They’re silent but they’re screaming in rage, the sound of nails on blackboards, and they’re pretty about it, sweet and denying.  But I was crying all through the song “Up on a Roof”.  It was incredible to see the backstory.  “We got to get out of this place.”  “You’ve lost that Loving Feeling.”  These songs we all knew came right out of the context of Carole King’s personal incredible life.
Carole King and her mom and her two daughters and Tapestry.  I loved Tapestry.  I didn’t know everyone else did. I just loved it.  I loved learning all the awards and accolations she won and deserved.  But I’d read her biography before the show and it left out the later marriage to the addict and the communes and the craziness and the domestic violence and all the insanity that came later. It was nostalgic. I love that she’s in her 70’s and has written this incredibly uplifting and wonderful piece about her teens and twenties and it ends with Tapestry.
I think I’d like to write a story of my own life which ends with my graduating medicine before the deaths, the HIV epidemic, the rapes,  abortions, more divorces, drugs, alcohol, lies, betrayals,  and the government lies,  corruption and the deaths by bureaucracy.  I wish life could have stopped at Franny and Zooey and Catcher on the Rye and not gone onto Kafka  Bonhoffer, and Arendt.
Not really. I’m thankful for it all.  I’m happy looking back but there was that innocence. That’s what Carole King captured. That time of innocence. There was that time in the 60’s and 70’s when a whole generation believed, before the Clintons and Bush and the Obamas, before the Castros and Trudeaus.  Before the wars, after the wars, after the wars to end all wars, and the working, always working, always working. and the struggle. Always the struggle to pay the rent and to stop another wasteful death.
There was a time of innocence.  That’s what I was crying about. The dance was just so good. The music was just so good. The songs were just so good and the lyrics really did capture it. And the music really did tell it. And we were young. God we were young.  For a couple of hours we all got to relive our youth.
Remember the Monkeys.
“You’ve got a friend.”  “Will you love me tomorrow"
And when it’s all over, it’s still “Beautiful’.  Thank you Carole King. It really was an emotional rocket ship roller coaster ride and you got it right once again.  Such spectacular art!
Laura and I loved Beautiful, the Carole King Musical!
God I loved this show. We loved this show. And by the teary eyes of all the white haired folk around me we all loved this show.  And there were these neat young people there and they were grooving with the music. And it was hard to believe this but the whole cast was in their 20’s and they were unbelievable. Chilina Kennedy played Carole King and her acting and singing was out of this world. But then all the cast were perfect, dancing, acting , singing. It was the flawless, beautiful ,the best.  In a way it was all we believed it could be.
Thank you Carole King.

Gratitude derailed

Thank you for the light in the morning when I walk the dog. This morning the sky was blue and the crocuses have returned. I’ve seen daffodils and now the neighbours tulip stalks are up.  I’m so looking forward to the tulip days to come.  It’s like somehow this year I lost faith in the fall and winter coming to an end.  My brother’s diagnosis has brought me face to face with aging.  I’m seeing illness all about me in a way that I’ve not for so many years.  There’s always been the itching sensations after treating the scabies patients.  The germophobias that assail me somedays.  I know that I can’t go out from fear now some weekends.  The attacks come back. There’s this lack of faith that I’ve had.
My decision to stop marijuana smoking as occasional as it was still remains an issue too because even though I drank and that was little compared to the mainstream today I felt I was wrong to be ‘breaking the law’ by smoking marijuana. As a professional it didn’t matter that I did this on holidays or weekends. It didn’t matter that I bought my marijuana from doctors or that I smoked marijuana with doctors , psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and lawyers. It didn’t even matter that I had seen a psychiatrist who recommended that I smoke marijuana given my wife’s illness.  All that didn’t sit well with me.  Spiritually I’d felt that I wasn’t right. I’d made a promise to God to change my life. And I felt that smoking marijuana was breaking the law and I didn’t consciously break the law.
I was and am and always was a law abiding citizen for the most part even though in Canada today the legal system and bureaucrats and parliamentarians think people who are law abiding so called good citizens are fools, that’s what I was.  I’d speed in my car occasionally but these were lapses of judgement.  The marijauana smoking was conscious. I truly believed that the State was wrong, not just in it’s views of individual behaviour with respect to drugs but with its views towards sex and a variety of ’social laws’.   As I got older I saw that Canada wasn’t a ‘free society’ in a lot of ways and when I smoked marijuana I was ‘rebelling’.
Yet here I was riding on roads made by the collective.  I was enjoying the clean water and food that came from the collective.  I was thankful for the courts and parliament for the jails and laws that fought murderers and thieves  I enjoyed so much of what our ancestors had given us in our buildings schools and churches.  I was being paid as a physician through the organization of health care. I was taught as a physician.  These were all ‘lawful’.  So what was I do ‘breaking the law’.  Why was I smoking dope.  I drank wine and that wasn’t an issue.  I was a wine connoisseur. Yet when I drank wine I smoked cigarettes and marijuana. I’d concluded as a physician that smoking cigarettes was stupid, evil, extraordinarily unhealthy and that the tobacco boards were organized crime. I further thought that our government was corrupt to arrest marijuana smokers but allow tobacco producers to be rich and major influences on the supreme court and parliament.
When I drank legal alcohol I’d smoke again though I’d quit and when I was smoking cigarettes I’d prefer a joint so I’d break the law and get some marijuana as well. I’d even tried cocaine but was glad it didn’t agree with me.  My pleasure seemed to be red wine and smoking a mix of low strength marijuana and tobaco.  I thought I was ‘cool’ when I was a little buzzed.  Like I was James Bond and Sherlock Holmes and that I could write and play guitar better. I was wrong . I also thought I was a better lover. I was slower but I don’t think I was a better lover. I know too I didn’t think about work and I didn’t worry and I was just happy to sit and let the world go round and round as compared to my normal state where I’m trying to help and work and concerned about what I could do next.  I certainly never worried I wasn’t fulfilling my destiny or doing all I could be or achieving my potential or what others thought when I smoked a joint. I was utterly narcissistic and definitely purely pleasure oriented. A hedonist. Canada is a country of hedonism today or some might call it "shedonism'.
But I was breaking the law.
So when I stopped I sought help from the Physician Assistance program.  I couldn't get my wife to address her illness so I felt the best way was for me to admit my problem, and that this would lead to her getting help.  I was a politically outspoken person who had represented a lot of cases against the totalitarian corrupt authorities.  I’d been an outspoken critic against communists and fascists and Canada breeds both in abundance in high places.  I had integrity and told the truth and defended patients from abuses from above as much as I fought the diseases which plagued them from within.  It made me a lot of enemies.  Reporting a pedophie means that he’s caught but the ring survives.  Reporting a doctor doing unauthorized experiments on patients for profits catching him but not the nest. Always the very authorities whose job it was to protect patients were collecting their pay and not doing their job.  I was a vigilante good samaritan, doing the right thing.  But of course, when the criminal was caught, it was naturally asked why the beurocrats who are paid millions to protect patients didn't get these 'big fish'.  They naturally looked bad and they hated people like me.  I think too that they're there to 'protect' those 'special  doctors who aren't like the rest.
I had to do it .  It was a thing I had with this ingrained integrity and ethics and morality that said that doctors shouldn't be killing and that eurocrats shouldnt be colluding.  Of course everyone wondered who was getting kickbacks.  Why  were these doctors getting away with murder.  The elite protects its own.  It’s disgusting but true.  To get ahead they have to have protection within the courts and high places and especially within the bureaucracy. I exposed this.  If you do good in Canada you will be burnt. I was a whistleblower and whistleblowers are all collectively condemned in Canada.  The State thrives on 'informants' and encourages 'confidential informants' and administrators carry little black books like all good communists do but 'whistleblowers' are another thing.  They disrupt the common business of corruption and undermine the whole 'institution baksheesh' industry.  The Reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.  The whole job of the elite, the bureaucracy and the courts is to resist change.  Change  threatens  the powerful.   The lie is they are always 'promoting change' deceitfully.  Lie, lie, lie!  Deny. Deny Deny!  It's the halcyon cry of the courts and bureaucracy.  Fuddle Duck!!!
I cause change.  My generation was a ‘change catalyst.’
My question at the time is what do I do with my drug addicted wife and how can we get help with our marriage.  I’d been divorced and concluded that I  was facing another divorce and the common ingredient in my divorces was that my wives and I drank and smoked marijuana.  Of course given feminism in it’s day and the radical feminists in beaurocracy they had long concluded that all divorce was the cause of men, another common ingredient in marriage,  so drugs were irrelevant.  This was before lesbian marriage with its similar rate of divorce so the idea that men were the cause of divorce went out the window but too late for my marriage.  I divorced.  I was punished as men are in divorce .  It's a sexist society, i.e. men are sexist.  I was also punished as marijuana smokers were in the day.  Marijuana smoking wasn't actually punished but rather being truthful about marijuana smoking.  The same as homosexuality. For the longest time homosexuality wasn't punished as long as you were not truthful about it.  Society is that kind of lie.  I was punished because while the bureaucracy paid lip service to the idea of ‘disease’ the individuals involved in the programs were holier than thou and claimed that they were the guardians of the public good.
Yet they didn’t care that the prime minister was smoking dope as a teacher and that the prime minister was smoking dope as an MP.  They didn't about the irreparable damage he did as a teacher and the irreparable damage his example has had on children.  Baseball players and hockey players are condemned for smoking marijuana because they are an 'example' to children but Justin Trudeau was smoking marijuana when he was an Member of Parliament so what kind of example does that set for children.
They justified all that they did to me and others by the idea that we were a threat to society. I was never a threat to society and never made a bad decision. I loved the movie with Denzil Washington as the pilot because that’s what I saw in my case and for those around me.  This horrible ‘war on drugs’ world was coupled with beaurocratic pomposity and deceit.
So my marriage ended.
The friends of the men whose friends I’d caught stealing, killing and raping, suddenly gloatingly became my superiors holding my freedom in their hands.  I was terrorized by a little hitler and his little eva brawn.  And today I’m afraid of drugs because I believe seriously that too many people in Canada are on drugs and that the only way we have been able to get another lying Trudeau in leadership is because Canada is a nation of stoned drunks.  I would have voted Trudeau when I was smoking dope.
So I’ve not handled the election well. I’ve not handled watching 18 billion candian dollars go to the PARTY.  I’ve not handled the lies well and the idea that others don’t ‘get’ it.  I’ve also wanted desperately to smoke dope again so I can join the stupidity and not be aware of what’s happening.  I’d like to smoke dope and believe that there isn’t illness and everything is an illusion and that if I just have my dope mind I’ll get by.  When I smoked dope it was like I was one of the batteries in the  movie Matrix. I thought the Matrix was the best movies about the drugged and the awake.
I’m awake today.It's hard to be awake.  I think of the millions who were not caught up in the Hitlermania of their day or the Lenninmania of their day.  There's this 'mania', an orgy that I could get myself caught up in when I was smoking dope and drinking. I liked the group grope and hedonistic throb of the club scene when I was a little high and in denial of reality.  I loved the escape to adolescence, the disregard and animal like awareness that drugs brought.  I smoked a joint and drank some wine and I was blatto.  My IQ dropped and I had trouble following conversations or walking to the bathroom. I was demented.  Usually I was actually more aware than the thousand or so others in the club since I was only a light user in public and at home I used to just go to bed early.  I was a happy drunk, if drunk is the right word.  Rarely was I angry but like all couples drinking we had our shouting matches.  She was always a public ranter screaming at me when I wanted to get her home public scenes worked well for women.  I remember trying to get drunk women into taxis to get them home with even drunker men trying to keep them at parties and me caught between these two drunken nightmares.  Sometimes I went home alone and worried all night if she'd get home somehow.  When I went to Al Anon I was the 'wife' and my stories were the norm for that group. I fit right in.  They'd all been their with their drunks and addicts.  And yes, some of them had joined in but the fact was we'd always been the 'adults'.  We'd been the ones who had to 'get the other home' or take care of the 'adult' business the next day. I was always 'papa'.  I am seriously tired of being the 'man' .  I always knew I could take care of myself and I could take care of others but that if there was trouble I really couldn't rely on the wife to take care of me. She was hardly able to take care of herself.  It wasn't just out in the wilderness but in the city. I've watched the new rage of girls in high heels beating up guys in tv movies and it's more of the lie.  I've known too many situations where there's three or four men and I'm defending myself and a woman and the woman is usually drunk and stoned and often caused this scenario but probably won't remember what happened the next day.  Or she'll rewrite the script to be something like a Supergirl scenario and ultimately she'd find a way to blame me for her drunkeness or being stoned legless.
I’m thankful fortmy sobriety. I’m thankful I’m not stoned. I’m grateful for the relationship i have with family and true friends and the journey I’ve been on if only because it helps me related to the horrendous abuse that so many Canadians have had who when they smoked dope at their jobs were subjected to forced treatment for the benefit of society. I am thankful that Justin Trudeau driving his car stoned didn’t kill anyone and I didn’t kill anyone even though I now know that people who smoke dope are ‘impaired’ for 36 hours though they feel the effects of marijuana for only a few of those hours. I’m thankful I didn’t hurt anyone except my beautiful ex wife with my unkind words because her drug addiction was so much worse than anything I experienced and I never was understanding of her it mpairment because I was totally caught up in the narcissism that drugs does to self and relationships.  I know today that relationships are the first thing harmed by drugs and that we can’t really know each other when we’re in a parallel play only because our only intimacy is with the ‘drug’.
I suspect there’s a ‘dose ‘ factor. I think there’s a ‘steady state’.  Certainly pharmaceutical medications don’t ‘impair’ like ‘self administered pleasure’ drugs. I don’t suspect there is a ‘low dose’ that can be helpful but that this isn’t like the aspirin where we know the dosage by years of study.  With marijuana it was always ‘good’ weed’ , bad’ weed’ and effects over time. I truly don’t think ‘maui wow’ was ever strong enough to do more than what a beer did but BC Bud is “killer weed’ far more potent than possibly cocaine or tequila.  A regular hallucinogen.  I hope one day that agents like SATIVEX will make dope safe.
But I’m struggling with this right now.  When I hear Truedau speak I could swear he’s had a joint especially when he smirks to himself.
I loath that the Trudeau household was a Maggie filled dope house of second hand smoke when my friends were being put in jail for one joint. I hate the double standard and I’m really struggling with getting old and thinking I may be dependent on institutions like my parents were and have to trust again. Because I stopped trusting 17 years ago when I divorced and I witnessed the worst medical care I’d ever believed possible and saw first hand abuses of power that I never in my life would have thought could occur in Canada and yet were done to me.  I’m lucky to be alive.  God had other plans. I put my living down to the intervention of an unknown female Irish psychiatrist and some Christian doctors who believed in truth and love more than profit and power.
But I’m struggling. A whole PTSD time coming back to me and questions between me and God about prayer and faith and gratitude.  And rumours of war and end days and Freud saying ‘maybe the paranoids are right’ and me thinking really ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’.  And everyone seeming to be smiling their joint like smiles, while  I’m standing on the street during “Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ scene.  The smell of marijuana reeks. I can’t get away from it in Vancouver.  It’s worse than the smell of second hand smoke or stale beer.
I'm hoping for tulips and that this too will pass. I'm hoping that with spring I'll snap out of this and find gratitude. I know I'm needing to deal with resentments and fears and that I have to get my head into the same room as my head. I've got to be thankful. I've got to find a way of seeing this present situation in a way that spiritually makes me a better person. I always remember Dr. Ney, the great anti abortion physician saying, the world is full of bitter people. You have choice.  He'd cry when he heard of more babies being killed.  I see the light going out in the eyes of people when they're on drugs and alcohol. He saw the light going out in the world when a baby was killed because there was no hope and no one cared for life.  Death stalks the earth.  But there is gratitude.  And with an attitude of gratitude there is no room for the darkness, fear and resentment.  That's what Hal Morley told me and Hal was a light in the darkness.
So again I must find gratitude.  Thank you God that I'm alive. The daffodils are out.  Soon the tulips will return.

My Friend's Wedding

I enjoyed my friend's wedding. I have hope for her. Her husband is French Canadian. The French Canadians believe more in children and family than us English speaking Canadians. She is Thai and not so far removed from her traditions to go for the 'legal lottery' of divorce, blaming the man, taking the winnings, and baksheeshing the lawyers and judges for the war of the roses. If the divorce court were my only encounter with Canadian justice I'd have long ago turned in my citizenship to become a terrorist against this unholy regime. We punish love in this country. We take advantage of the wounded.
Thankfully I've see the lawyers and judges working in their traditional milieu where the enemies are businesses and the casualities aren't the innoscent. My respect for the courts grows as I age seeing the need for lawyers to defen individuals against the state and to negotiate between different business interests. I also appreciate the need for justice to deal with criminals. But marriage is holy. Children are the children of God. Property of family is for the future of family not the interlopers and the courts.
I'm a slow learner. Three divorces and major set backs each time. Broken promises all round and the feeling in the end like some ship wrecked adventurer. There was no NorthWest Passage. Only now with global warming are seas unthawing. There were no maps for what my beloveds and I set out to do.
The consequence is 50 % divorce, no one knowing if the 'good' or 'bad' marriages by description or design survived. 5 year life expectancies the new shelf life. Yet only 5 years before me the average marriage lasted decades.
Feminists hated men and hated family. Social communists they called men the beougeosie and women the proletariat. John Lennon called 'women the nigger of the world' and we believed it. Before the publishing of the "Hazards of Being Male" and science prevailed over doctrine. Gender didn't matter if you were an agricultural worker. Racism was a slander since Indians had their casts and blacks their big black bossman and now North American Indians have their millionaire chiefs. It was always the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor.
I was thankful to be born in Canada, son of hard working, Christian, law abiding parents of Scottish origin, believers in education and culture, lovers of the outdoors. I grew up on camping and competence. I was blessed.
I blamed myself for the failure of the marriages, blamed myself with the greatest of self loathing despite the women coming from broken families of addiction, divorce and suicide. The best defence is an offence. I was a provider and protecting. My sperm passed the test. I had no control over the abortions. And everyone was having abortions. Divorce and abortion were the macabre dance of the 80's and 90's. Death stalked us everywhere. Even today the ecologists tell us to kill ourselves to save the planet. Old and jaded I note that none of them are stepping forward to show the way. Even Suzuki would offer himself for euthanasia but blames the immigrants instead. Isolationism and fear are the backlash to the ideology and hope of the late 60's and 70's.
I went to so many weddings when I was young. I was the groom too many times but loved being best man, usher, photographer and friend. Then and today I still love the baptisms and christenings and occasional brisque. My father, now dead, said there'd been a time of funerals and then all his friends too were dead. In the end he longed desperately to join his wife and friend of 55 years, my mother.
It is family I pray for each morning. My brother and sister in law loom large in my loneliness. I am thoroughly amused by my nephews and their lives, thankful for Facebook that I can observe their youth. My dog is as always my friend. Friends are close too but not like those roommates and lovers, the ones I married who seemed like someone I'd known in another life and would again know. I miss them. Whatever irritation they gave, the horror and shame of divorce, their rage and terror, whatever once so frightened me is no longer present. I am weary.
In theatre we had a green room. After the play we laughed together rehashing the bright spots of our performances. I loved the theatre. I loved the psychodrama and dance. I love the leading ladies and the props. The costumes were tiring. Even today I wear clothing for others. At home I go naked or wear just shorts or sarong. In science fiction books I've been enthralled by the new material that breathes and clings like skin to the astonauts,
I loved that the families were all together last night. I loved seeing all the little children. It's like church. Children and babies come out and even the old people are welcome. I sat with academics. These gentle folk whose ways are the product of years of surviving the politics of universities. I once longed to return. I saw the school as a place to learn and leave. Now I'm old and the young never left. I am a different thing than those who were so social and sensitive. I felt their wisdom and kindness in their speech. I'm too wild with the real world. I've been too long in the field to mix with the gentle folk.
I feel like a warrior returned from the war who finds no peace in the home. I'm waiting to be sent back to the north. I'm working now on the frontier of the downtown eastside, ghetto medicine. I see no safety in my future, no security or quiet. The university is too far behind and a different "Glass Bead Game" than the terror of the edge I'm foolishly involved in. I loved the way they talked to students and spoke of the lives of their children. A professor told me he'd taken his sabbatical and taken his children on a tour of the world.
I winced. I'd wanted just that life, years before when my divorce ripped me out of the university and I headed out to the front to protect just such places. I left ex wives their in safety, always a provider and protector.
I am a doctor too. I give solace and care, though more and more, it's humor for we're all aging and the parts are wearing and the thought are slow in coming to terms with the losses and mortality. The fear each day is like nails on frozen panes of ice. I'm reminded years ago of people coming to find me to talk people out of trees on bad trips or bad acid.
Everything is going to be alright. All is well. This too shall pass. It doesn't make it better if you cut yourself. There's no bridge high enough. What makes you think there will be an end?
A wedding is a beginning. The community of family and friends gather for an ancient ceremony. We pray and give our blessing for the couple to prosper and proliferate. Maybe they will find peace when the greatest minds of Judaism and Islam continue to fight it out today in the Middle East. Even today the greatest Christian nation in the world, the United States of America, is on the verge or war, economic or other with China which was the last resort for communism and the religion of aetheism. Russia killed 80 million, china a hundred and twenty million and America is condemned for the imprisonment of a million. Things could always be better.
In Canada our problems rarely get beyond the French and the English. The Idle No More American Indian movement threatens to escallate from passive aggression to all out war. In Canadian marriages there is no sex as a consequence just teenagers who smoke more marijuana than any other Industrial nation, choosing illusion over reality, unwilling to come up with a solution now that the communes and love in and wars of their parents have failed to find a solution for living together peacefully. Better to talk about the environment. Canadian women are considered the best housekeepers, for after divorce they always get the house.
Today couples often live in their parents home, like the third world here, where real estate is beyond the price of the young and old men like me drive sportscars, the youth making a virtue of cycling, healthy and as fast some times as my motorcycles.
I liked that there was some 'voluntary' and not 'commercial' in the wedding, unique and a kind of 'party' that the couple gave for us all as we gathered and gifted them. I'd just been to a rock concert and there the corporate flavour of that very slick venue was so different from the wonderful event of great spaces and pauses and people not knowing what they were to do despite the best efforts of a beautiful master of ceremonies. It was herding cats at best. Gilbert my dog was there too barking to be joined by all his girlfriend, the beautiful and bright women who have cared for him over the years. It was a joyful event.
I loved seeing Aim and Marc tooking for each other, touching each other, exchanging rings and finally kissing in public. Tears came to my eyes. Hope springeth eternal.
The couple beside me had been together more than 40 years and those across from me some 30

The plane is leaving . I must go.


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Christmas 2012

I don't have a wife and children. No matter how much marriage I did I didn't get a family which I took for granted would come out of marriage. My generation, Canadians collectively, my age anyway, are more of a 'divorce' culture. I've watched others take more pleasure and interest in divorce than weddings. The whole matter of dating has left me bitter, with legal bills, horrendous financial burden, loss of direction, displacement and the shame of it all. My friends who avoided the whole matrimony thing, had kids, paid the bills and lived together or didn't did better in the long run, except maybe those older than me. There's still a Rockwell picture in it for some.
50% divorce rates, higher rates of failure on second and third marriages. The legal lottery of divorce pays the highest to the best lawyers whereas the East Indian marriages survive often because of mutual jeopardy and the requirement that with divorce the wedding gifts are paid back. The only marriage in Canada anyway is the 'prenuptial aggreements', the courts showing little respect for the state or religious marriage contract. A third of the children of parental DNA test show that the children aren't the fathers who has often paid untold child support to a woman who can without abort a father's child leaving him feeling as I have felt, bereft, powerless, unmanly, devastated and disheartened.
It's been called a 'death culture', not just for the celebration of divorce that gives fetal Murderer Morgentaller the Order of Canada. It's like putting Hitler on the cover of Time. There's no rhyme or reason to these days. I'm jaded.
That's Christmas for single people. I celebrate my family and the winners in the social sports. I feel a loser this time of the year. I long for the parents past and the aunt and the family scenes of nostalgic childhood and Christmas dinners, and fireplaces. Friends have been great. They've even shared their families and homes and hearth with this silent scrooge. It's not polite to bitch and rant about Christmas, the social celebration, the consumer image and brand.
I'm just glad it's over. I have too much pain from the Christmas's that followed the years of separation and divorce and the death of family and the thought of the abortion of life.
I'm a recovered alcoholic too. 15 years ago I partied with the best of them, partnering with drug addicts and drunks but I got clean and sober and made amends and left that scene which was for this binge drinking, monumental at the Christmas New Year's hub. In the darkest nights of the year I lit up. We wouldn't drink for half a year but Christmas was a time of parties that began Christmas Eve and ended with the January hangover. Today I just don't like the drunks driving on the road and the smell of booze on breath and the chaos of the consumer frenzy with all the inducement to drunkeness. It's a time of the year I often go solo sailing to the islands. Just to get away. I have a dog who loves his extra treats, the bones and squeaky toys. He's never seen me drunk and I don't like the memory of arguments with drunken women or hung over women. I don't like dry drunks either, those short fuse, critical judgemental people with lots of blaming others for their unacknowledged depression, anxiety and anger. I don't like the angry entitled young men either with testosterone and expectation of respect for stupidity. I don't like going out at night on the streets even during the Christmas season. Mornings are great.
I love the church today. I love the trumpets and horns and caroles and the warmth of congregation. I love meetings too where we huddle together against the cold of the year.
This year Gilbert and I left the precarious heat and water of the sailboat and took a luxury hotel in Seattle. I had showers with endless hot water, turned the heat up high, watched the recent movies on pay tv and ordered in room service. The Alexis Hotel was extremely dog friendly and Gilbert met friends everywhere and the staff called out his name. I loved it. It was decadent. I listened to Michael Smith on the Message driving to and fro Seattle. I attended Trinity Episcopal Church and was delighted with the welcome Gilbert and I received in this loving inviting church. I opened the gifts from my family and friends Christmas Day and I didn't cry. I can nurse self pity with the best of them and think it's something more than just self absorption. I took delight in a friend volunteering her services caring for others this Christmas. It reminded me of the years I've worked Christmas and Hannukah because I didn't have children and could cover for those who did have family. It's often where us single people gather, helping others.
This year I had a cold and was glad to get over the bronchitis with rest and relaxation.
I know it's Christ's birthday. I know that Jesus wasn't born this day but that mid winter was a holiday the church tacked the birth of Christ too. Good a time as any since no one knows when he was born and even the year is suspect. Some question Bethlehem as his birthplace. I don't. I was there and whether it's the spiritual centre for millions of worshippers or a special place of historic significance, Bethlehem will ever remain a sacred moment in my memory. I really must get back to Israel. If ever my faith falters there's no better place to be. Walking in the steps of the man who was a 'servant king' who washed the feet of his disciples, raised the dead, healed the sick and preached the Good News, the Gospel.
I have a family in the church. I know that. I have a family in my nephews, neices, cousins and friends. I know that. But I'm Canadian so I define myself but what I don't have and what I'm not. I'm not American and I'm not European. We're all immigrants here, even the First Nations. Maybe only in the Middle East do people belong which is why they kill each other more over any piece of land than any other. A space ship probably landed the first Australians there and they bred with the locals giving rise to Atlantis or cro magnons whichever theory suits. They still can't explain why a Chimpanzee with more years than the Big Bang could never play Mozart. Alot of weasel room and fudge data in the theories that become political fights once people get mixing up the 'facts'.
I'd like to be levitating. I'd like to be singing Hosannah with arms outstretched but mostly I'm trying to block out the complaints to the college. Every Christmas I get a complaint to the college, mostly from drug addicts or alcoholics who I've refused to sign their chit. They get pay back. For every doctor a complaint to the college costs thousands of dollars and hours of time and only the most mediocre of doctors, those most protected, the best business men, the least risk takers, the ones who avoid the psychiatric patients, the prisoners, the sociopaths and psychopaths, who look on medicine as a good job, like the good administrative jobs that are so safe and well funded and pensioned in medicine, not the frontlines where disease exists. We're lead from behind. There are no leaders who lead their troops. There are none anymore who put themselves in harms way. They're all Monday morning quarter backs. No doctor can show pain because that's where they poke you if you do. They say open up and let your defences down, solely to know your vulnerability, while they hide in 1950, living lives of ivory tower perfection and delusional. I pray for them. Ee Cummings called 'them' , 'thosepeople', one word. It's the 'other' and Martin Buber said the great question is whether to love or fear them. I work on loving them. I love them and know they fear and hate me and I love them more wondering always if this is a good idea because sainthead seems to attract crucifixion and I'm too much coward and softee to want to tweak the nose of the beast these days. I want to slip away into old age or die quickly with my boots on. I 'm afraid. The future isn't trusty. I've done pretty good with mine so far but there's a lot of doubt in the air. Media, doubt, booze, economics, terrorists, talk of war, all that is hard to keep outside all the time especially with all the beggars and theives grabbing at one.
I can slip into a rant like the great Canadian Mercer. He calls politics his spectator sport. He's concluded the leadership should just stay home as they're increasingly irrelevant.
It's that time of the year. I'm going to get into gratitude for New Year's Eve,
I'm grateful, really. I read the secret. I know that my thinking has caused all the pain I've had. It's all my fault as my mother would say. I've also read Job and shit just happens because shit can.
Hallelujah! Hope is what Jesus brought. Hope not in this life. This life isn't real. The next one is. Heaven is real. This is just a kindergarden or training ground. This is where we learn that what we do has consequence and there is a thing called Karma. It's called divine retribution too. It's the number two law of Jesus. Number one was Love God. Since God is Love and Love is everything we really have to love even our enemies, bitch that that is. So much for fear, anger and self pity. That's all the doubt that sinks a Peter walking, preventing him from walking on water. I feel like that. Everytime I feel like I'm walking on water I think . It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Anyone can walk on air if you don't think about it. Then Jesus says "Love your Neighbour as Yourself". The price of gold these days and that's still called the Golden Rule. It's the law that Trumps Donald Trump and Einstein and Newton and all the laws of this world. It's tough because I'm here learning love , probably sent to earth as an interdimensional insane asylum. That's the best explanation for The Lord of Flies leadership ideas I encounter in the committee room geniuses who live above real consequences.
Bodily disease is what we think. As Jesus says it's not what you put in your mouth but what comes out of your mouth that counts. This is from the guy who avoids uttering profaniety but is cursed with vulgarity by the truly vulgar who don't know the difference. No surprise the Rapture left me behind.
I've hauled a hundred liters of diesel down to the boat for warmth. I'm going to exchange a gift for the right size. I've got more cleaning to do. I'm praying. I'm asking God what I'm supposed to do with this life. I'm begging him to point the way and give me direction. I'm feeling like I'm sitting on the bench a bit but that's another thing that happens mid winter. I'm always restored by the crocuses and they're only weeks away. It's like the morning after the dark night of the soul. There's always a dawn. The day Jesus was born the universe knew a new dawn. God entered creation. In the east they have saints escaping life, becoming God like and no longer having to do another term on earth. But Jesus was God coming to earth, the second Adam. Eve was Mary too. Eve the slut became Mary the virgin. Both gave birth to the human race, one secular, another sacred.
Some people life flat liner lives, like drug addiction and lizards. It's all concrete with no inner life, no emotional life and no spiritual life and no unconscious and conscious. The man with the most toys, money, power and lust objects and addictions wins. But without Love you have nothing. Love is all. Thank you Jesus.


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God is Spirit

I am a soul. I have this body. (Paraphrase - C.S.Lewis)
I am a spiritual being living in a material world.
The duality I experience is an illusion created by the mind. Physics teaches me that matter is slow energy. E=MC2 The laws of quantum physics don't just apply at the edges but are the essence of creation. Improbability and probability are central. My thoughts attract and create my experience. Others of like mind are involved in this my reality. The murderer and the murdered are part of a dance whereas elsewhere the lover and loved dance too. All is God and God is good. What seems now senseless and terrible is not as it seems because I "see but through a glass darkly". When I judge events of the world I am only having an opinion on what I am told and the selection of information as presented. What I can know is my own journey, my relationship with God, myself and others. From that experience I can have great empathy for the experience of others. In all the events of my life there were possibilities but where fate and free will applied much was fated. Ancients believed this was a product of reincarnation and projected this idea into the future as a way of modulating one's own behaviour. It is a fact that I was born with 10 fingers and 10 toes, my eye sight and hearing and physically fit to a loving family in middle class Canada. It would have been a different matter altogether if I was born without hands or feet in poverty and sickness left for adoption. I have no knowledge of why I was by most standards of this world 'gifted' to be born in Canada rather than Rwanda or Vietnam at the time of their wars.
I was introduced to God by my mother who encouraged my little flannel pyjama'd body to kneel beside my bed and pray. We prayed together like this and in church and Sunday School. I remember this as early as 5 years old but have little recollection of prayer before that though believe it was a part of the family heritage. I was raised Christian. Our church was Baptist.
There was a sacred magical sense in my childhood that lingers in my memory. As a child and later as a teen ager I was very aware of the presence of God. At many times in my life that sense of being in the midst of a loving higher power has been deeply real for me. I related to the Biblical reading of Adam in the Garden of Eden and God coming to walk with him. That sense of a guide and wiser spirit presence, a loving Father, has been with me often.
I have felt too that my prayers were answered. I have been so struck by the phenomena of synchronicity and coincidence and the miraculous that I have seen prayers 'manifest' reality. There has always seemed to me to be an association between my inner world and the outer world. I have studied psychiatry and know this is not the 'ideas of references' or the psychosis that some would insist all experience other than materialistic sex and aggression drives are. I have found Freud tedious as an aetheist. I much preferred the scientists like Einstein, Newton, Carl Jung and Milton Erickson whose faith in God and the ultimate holiness of creation was established. I thought Martin Buber a genius whereas Henry Mortgentaller was a sick and tragic man. I have considered much of my life in relationship to the spiritual and always found that I have worked better with the faith and knowledge of God and consideration of God and prayer than when I have struggled without. In my personal life I have most admired those men who have had a strong spiritual connection like early academic mentors, Dr. Carl Ridd and Dr. John White.
I have always struggled with the notion of sexuality and spirituality. I have seen that the majority of people have shared beliefs and like Dr. Owen Barfield felt this is the 'mainstream' of society's behaviour reflecting on perhaps the spiritual pathways one may follow. I've always enjoyed Dr. Scott Peck's ,"the road less travelled". And I tried to do the 'mainstream thing of heterosexual marriage and monogamy" but like 50% of the men of my generation we were faced with radical feminism and a 50% divorce rate. I have seen men I most admired, ministers, pure and sweet souls, from the finest homes with the best intentions and the greatest love devastated in the relationship wars of the 70's and 80's. I have called this 'social communism' and only now do I see women especially no longer angry and blaming and playing the 'gender card'. We are all in this together and I admire those who have successfully married, had children and raised them. I know that they have better skills and worked harder than I ever did and had greater compatibility. I married predominantly professional women who didn't have children and in retrospect didn't seem to want children and while sexy didn't seem that interested in sex compared to many other aspects of their lives. I believe that in relationship the 'blind man marries the deaf woman' so that we are with our complements and that my lack of children reflects either 'design' 'fate' or 'determinism' or an unconscious desire not to have children causes me to choose specifically women who didn't have children. I believe too that psychiatric truism "ask a woman why she hasn't had children and she will mostly likely tell you why she feels her mother didn't want children". Certainly the feminists, call them radical or whatever, of my era considered children least and saw careers, status and personal life fulfillments as most important. Children were a hindrance and a burden to these radical women who quite frankly appeared to imitate men. Today they strut about in business suits and have fancy cars, aetheism, materialism and flaunt young boys as their sex toys. I remember when they condemned the men who did this very same thing. They were vociferous in their criticism but then Freud did teach us that 'identification with the aggressor' was an immature defence and coping mechanism so we can all consider these 'shallow' 'hollow girls' as T.S. Elliott might call them as failures of humanity like their male brethren. That is, if we believe that 'altruism' and 'care for others' as opposed to 'narcissism" and strict care of one's self and pleasure is the goal of life. Happiness is many things. All over their are orgies and drugs and alcohol are part of the world of leaders of state male or female. Indeed the advance of women in society has brought them all the 'diseases' and 'stresses' that were once thought 'manly' so these 'radical feminist' executive women male like in their overall behaviour share the lack of 'fulfillment' and physical stress medical ills that had an earlier generation of men turning to spirituality as a means of making sense of existence. These women without children are now buying lulu lemon yoga pats and meditating on the meaning of existence. Oprah like Buffet and Gates and the truly great man, Carnegie, before them are devoting themselves to altruistic care of others with benefactorial community responsibility. The media tells us about the failures of the rich and famous men and women and takes greatest interest in the naked breasts of a princess or the naked buttocks of a prince insisting the masses want this and indeed ensuring the masses want this by giving the masses only cakes and ale, yet thankfully the internet gives all the diversity of information that allows some to look more than at the surface of things. Don't get me wrong I'm as voyeurstically attracted to the breasts of princesses and buttocks of princes but there is so much more that occurs each day, like the rescue of a child, or the education of a student, or the space walk that seem to be sidelined for the sake of the drunk and stoned who cannot appreciate more than the basest of experience.
In the midst of all of this I pray to God and ask God. A friend condemns homosexuality and I can't find it in me to do this. A friend condemns all relationship but monogamy and again I can't find it in me to do this. I'm a divorced bisexual man who through fault or choice have not succeeded in striving for the heterosexual monogamous family Rockwell Biblical prototype ideal where children are treated like little Gods and Goddesses, princes and princesses and the world as I know it is set out predominantly for everyone to be involved in just that task. Indeed, I taught thousands of children, delivered a hundred babies and saved thousands of children's live and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes for children's services that have helped others and their children without direct benefit to me. I don't have children and when it came down to it the women I married told me they didn't want them either. Then one day I was old and frankly figure I was doing enough for others children that I was happy not to come home to my own. Today I'm happy with my dog.
My friends with children have been 'policed' by their children and the institutions that surround their children. I remember female doctor colleagues who were drunken pot heads socially cleaning up their acts overnight after becoming pregnant. I know literally dozens of close friends who were given the ultimatum to clean up their acts or they'd lose their children. I've watched doctors be hauled in before principles about their language. I've stopped going to homes of friends with children because they are indeed living in a Disneyland repeat of some childhood experience that they didn't seem to get enough of. I "did' childhood thank you. I'm happy to watch a movie where people actually 'fuck' and there's blood and guts and 'reality' rather than a 'white washed version' of events 'for the sake of the children'. I am like alot of old farts wanting to not have any children around me and am very fond of 'over 55' housing and activities. I miss the family communities of the country where children and old people and dogs and cats were all present at the weekly dances but I don't want anything to do with soccer moms and hockey dads' and that whole 'little miss sunshine' thing with parents using their children to live through. I have my own life and I'm not expecting my dog to be a basketball star because I wanted to be a basketball star as a kid and wasn't .
My friend who is pure and angelic and has deep long term meaningful relationship with men and for all I know may not have genitals or go to the washroom though there is one in her place, probably for guests, dresses always in white and simply never married though she is truly one of the sexisest creatures I've ever known, finds that she has no 'place' in the church today as I find the 'church' mainstream excludes me. I believe the medieval church loved both of us. We were the single aunts and uncles who were ever present in 'community' but today everyone expects her to marry and have children as they view me as an utter failure for divorce and lack of children. Yet both of us attend church and when people go on and on about their children we both begin to bore them in return with our talk of travel and adventures.
Some Jungian woman with children and a degree calls us both as having "Peter Pan" syndrome. Yet I didn't buy the contraceptives and I did my best to sew my seeds and the scientists said my seeds were adequate to the task. I don't resent not having children in this sense but I do blame the courts for their lack of fairness and justice in the gender wars of the 70's and 80's. It seemed obvious to me that the courts were in the industry of taxing marriages by charging and arm and a leg for divorce while not holding the institutions accountable for divorce in the way we hold a bar tender accountable for serving drinks to a drunk who goes out and crashes his car. Having devoted a quarter century to making a physical family without success I really think I should get my money back from the church and state that instead punished me financially for the experience while the women themselves punished me financially too. Yet I could not claim victimship because adult men and now adult women could not compete with radical feminist women who abused drugs and alcohol and didn't have children but became childlike when they were hurt and demanded to be treated by society as 'child like victims' playing the gender card. Bob Dylan said it well when he wrote she acts like a woman but "breaks just like a little girl". In contrast this war culture with the militaristic attitude to men alone said, "man up" to us boys when we cried.
I wouldn't recommend a man cry today. When I've cried it's shown my enemies my place of hurt so vulnerable I've been injured more there. Crying is a very private thing in this society. When my mother died and I was grieving terribly a female minister failed me utterly, a female assistant used the opportunity to steal from me and attack me and the state used the opportunity to savage me. Thankfully lawyers, both male and female, helped stave off the attacks that my grief occasioned. It's not wise to show weakness despite all the encouragement in the pop psychology flakey granola world. Women who have been hurt in my experience are at equal risk of further pain if they don't stand up.
That said there are places and people where we must be open. It might not be with lovers who later in courts will use the intimacy to make money. It may be with friends or counsellors or doctors or lawyers. There's a place where we need to be open and we join with others mostly through our shared vulnerability.
Jesus was a 'servant king'. He taught of a God that didn't only care for the mighty but was there for the least. He washed the feet of his disciples. We are spiritually loved not just for our successess but equally for our failures. God is with us as my friend Milton, now dead, said, "in the whorehouse and in the jail." Now if the 'whorehouse and jail' were happy fulfilling places then no doubt God would want us there to but as they aren't the best outlet for creative expression in living with greatest possibility for happiness and most likely greatest benefit versus risk, God probably doesn't want that for us, though I don't know that God would 'disapprove'.
There are 'spiritual laws' in a way like physical laws. There are 'easier' ways of living. Clearly everything has a bit of the stockmarket gamble to it. Our society is to a large extent a great Los Vegas with investment houses little better than casinos at times. A friends father said that his 'blue chip' investments paid little and all his conservative financial planning did little compared to his 'wild' decision to invest in a start up company called "IBM". There is no certainty in this life. I would have preferred to live the mainstream with family and children. I have already said I fully admire those who have taken that route and today I don't think I want 'police" children in my life and am a little concerned about a society that justifies all manner of censorship based on the 'children'. Personally I think the 'children' are being used in this case for 'ulterior motives'. Indeed we are often asked these days to go to war 'for the children' when once we went for 'the flag'. I'm more suspicious in my old age and having paid so many hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes to help others raise their children and served children and families all my life in work I'm kind of looking forward to an adult world away from all that 'child police state' world though I'll forever miss the country community where children dads and grand parents all mixed at the dances. I loved growing up with my grandparents and uncles and aunts about but I don't have children and my life without children is very much not a part of the mainstream that dominates so much of society. I'm also single and divorced and the mainstream society serves mostly the intact families. Indeed when I first divorced, divorced men were excluded from partnerships and I was denied several positions of work because I was 'divorced'. "We don't hire divorced people" I was told by government and clinics. I was further told "My wife doesn't like me to associated with divorced men". "We only have married friends". I think that's good but I've lived that part of my life and today I'd rather be with other divorced and single people that are forming loving friendships than that group of people living in the mainstream. If I was a woman I would have had a child. I believe radical feminism was intrinsically 'anti-children" and indeed I was as much a part of the 'culture of narcissism' that describes well the social decadence of the 60's set now growing into senility. I'm the tail end of the 'baby boomers' and the ravages of drugs and boozer continue to take people I have known long before a life of less self indulgence might otherwise have taken them.
My father died at 94. I find myself reflecting on life again and wondering what is important to me now. Clearly spirituality is. I want to be 'ready' for death. I want to contemplate life and death and God. I want to live in love rather than fear. I want to continue to serve my fellow man and women and community. I want tyo participate fully in society but more so in those aspects that acknowledge the infinite and our relationship to a higher power. I'd like to get more 'right' with the world and God. I 'd like to lessen the 'pain' of existence before my aging puts me more in the 'pain' of existence just because of facts of life like gravity. People with children have their 'immortality' assured in someway in this earthplane but I'm not so focussed on this earthplane as I might well be if I had children. I don't know if that's true. I want to find a place where I am welcome as a single divorced old person who is spiritual and sexual and living as a spiritual being in a material world. I want to celebrate life more, sail, ride my sports car, field the wind in my hair, dance, hunt, fish, work, play and do all that but more with God in all aspects of my life and existence. I can't have the life my father had. Family dominated his world as did his wife of 60 years and he lived with other Christians mostly in a Canada where the majority of people he lived and worked among had been part of the fight against Nazism and Communism. He was as all Canadians were in those days communal libertarians of a sense but today the politics and cities are global and cultures are mixing faster than the legal systems and other institutions can adapt. It's a different sort of chaos I've inheritted and I must give order to this with the help of my faither and God and friends and community.
I never know if I should share these musings. Ramblings and journalling but I do. Messages in bottles from shipwrecked sailors on islands. Kindred souls have touched and communicated with me over the years. Other writers and authors and poets and songsters and scientists and police and judges and politicians and painters have all communicated in kind with me. It's what I like really. There are blogs of all manner of rantings and ravings and we know that people are thinking all manner of things and we can see that all around there is creation. Where there is creation there to the creator is.


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