Morning Pages

Julia Cameron in Artist’s Way encouraged people to write, without censorship, ‘morning pages’. This was her exercise to help people get their ‘creativity’ ‘flowing’.  She felt ‘creativity’, especially as a writer, was a spontaneous childlike process that had been stymied by years of criticism and restriction.  So she said, ‘write each morning, whatever comes to mind’.
In Recovery, it seems that often the twin vultures of fear and resentment are sitting on the bedside ready to begin their days attack on our peace of mind. Hence, for me, morning pages, when I practiced this process seemed a kind of way of ‘squeezing the shit out of my mind’. I wrote down whatever was troubling me first.  Today that’s change of staff and a contractor making a mistake that will not only cost me thousands more dollars but lose me thousands and require me to conjure up a half day of my time out a week already squeezed full by the 8 or 9 days expected out of 5 work working days available.
I’d really like to wallow in self pity. I’d like to whine and blame someone else for my troubles but frankly no one cares.
That raises it’s whole other sort of issues. I’m in the last third of my life and feel like I’ve let everyone else through the door, actually helped them, and now chivalry is dead and I’m left standing at the rear in a culture of agism and misogyny.  So there’s a whole new source of self pity.
I”m normal. I liked to suck on the tit of self pity. I want to cry to my long dead mother. I want someone else to shoulder my burdens.  I want Jesus to get down off the cross and make me breakfast. I mean, really!
I was happy to hear these last few days that when a man 100 years old was asked how he felt, he answered 20.  I don’t feel my age.  Like my still gorgeous friend who told me in her 40’s she was leering at a young man who wasn’t paying any attention when she had the insight that she was looking out at this young hulk from the inside of a corpse. She had this realization halfway through life with a body and beauty many would die for. I’m there now.  I describe myself more and more as the ‘fat old white guy’.  This is in a hip slick world of self help talk gurus who says things like ‘it’s a privilege to be getting old’.
Sure, but it doesn’t seem to help getting laid.
I’m a master of the quick retort when anyone wants me to get off the nipple of self pity or better still the other nipple of fear and resentment.  Notice how the metaphors of vultures and breasts intertwine.
It came up when a patient told me that the Conservatives had passed a bill outlawing men seeking to pay women for sex while making it legal for women to sell sex.  Meanwhile I answered that I thought it remiss that last year there was no laws against prostitution in Canada and somehow I’d missed that memo.  It all brought to mind the famous comedian joke which went, when I was a young man I was disgusted at the idea of paying for sex, but now that I’m in my 50’s and begging is no longer working so well, I don’t think the idea is such a bad one.
Meanwhile the proponents suddenly began talking about teenagers (young women) being ‘exploited’ and evil male ‘pimps’ abusing ‘women’. And I found myself involuntarily retching like I do when I hear the Quebec separatists get on their soapbox.  This is when women are in fact the ones who are confronting this ‘bill’ because they say it will ‘interfere’ with their ‘business’.  But these ‘older women’ who are indeed the ‘madames’ must be stopped because they’re ‘obviously exploited’ by some as yet undiscovered ‘men’. I used to ask radical feminists how can they actually believe their rant about women having nothing when Queen Elizabeth was our monarch. I just listened to an Australian woman going on and on and on, the way they do, when I asked her if she happened to know that the richest most powerful 'person' in Australia was a woman.  These people seem truly gender blind to Hillary Clinton while they ignore the 20 year old male hookers offering blow jobs at half the price of their female co workers in a tough street market.
I guess, sitting at the Red Square last week in a MacDonalds enjoying a Mc Cafe and egg Mc Muffin I kind of hoped that “social communism’  might eventually fall like the Berline wall.  All this  “I”m the poor proletariat and you’re the bad bourgeoisie”  rant should somehow end. I hoped that seeing a shopping mall in the Red Square might shut up all the 'rhetoric' of that old dead 'regime'.  I'd seen the phoenix rising in the church revival in St. Basils. I'd seen the new life infused in the very heart of the death culture of the old communist world.  Yet I came home to Canada to hear this old debate still couched in the old language of the 'victim' and 'victimizer'.  Meanwhile it's just 'me and them".  I'd just listened to the song 'ding dong the witches dead' and watched the children running about the village playing again and the bells ringing only to return to the Conservative Government of Canada spouting communist rant about 'exploited women' while wanting us to buy their 'market approach to the world' .  This is insane!!!
One day, in the 90’s, it was recognized that those who were always ‘helping the exploited’ were, well, like Hitler who went to the ‘rescue’ of the poor Austrians, or Stalin who invaded his neighbours to ‘help’ them.  The 'exploited' never get better with the activists and the hand outs but rather they get better with community and helping each other. I don't even want to talk about this anymore because the world is 'caregivers and victims' and the 'caregivers' will kill me if I even question their corruption. I just watched the millions of dollars of government corruption called the 'Portland Hotel Society' and the major benefactors who stole the milk right out of the babies mouths got off with a handshake.   MP Jenny Kwan actually blamed her 'man' .
So, forgive me, but I see the people ‘protecting adult women’ from ‘evil men’ as essentially ‘exploiting’ the prostitutes.  The legislators want a cut of the action. They're the 'dirty men'.  I remember too well when the women prostitutes of Paris marched through the streets and shut down the city because they didn’t want these pompous ‘daddies and mommies’ to interfere in their ‘business’.
In the ‘metaphor’ of ‘capitalism’ , “my body is my own’, means I can be a mercenary or a prostitute.  Historically men risked their bodies in work or war whereas women risked their bodies in sex or childbirth but today men and women die in war and men and women work the sex trade. Men and women ‘sell their bodies’ but all the language of the 'bill' about prostitution was disgusting gender biased so there was little talk of 'men' and no mention whatsoever about the most outcast in todays society, the 'transexuals'.
There's always been a 'trade' in 'blood'. I sold my blood to pay for my tuition to medical school.   Right now everyone is up in arms about ‘sale of body parts’. Meanwhile just like health care, the 'local's' are denied services whereas  the elite 'shop for health care globally'. The 'elite' go overseas for postitution and buy babies they bring back to Canada where women are told "your body is your own' but the fact is the 'state' and the 'courts' especially ,own your body.  There is supposed to be ‘suppy and demand’ but the ‘law makers’ and ‘judges’ in this business world are introducing sanctimonious stupidity into an area where all acknowledge the need for ‘regulation’ not ‘censure’ ,because ‘censure’ simply doesn’t work.  It drives the industry into the black market and removes it from taxation and medical attention.
The next three people I spoke to about the Conservative government’s prostitution bill immediately mentioned ‘young girls’.  Girls and boys are not considered men and women in Canada until they are 19 and maybe even 21 or 25 because they can look older but until they’re about 25 or 30, men can go to jail for having sex with them because our child protection laws are the most stringent in the world. So the prostitution bill has nothing to do with ‘girls or boys’ but says instead we will put adult women out of work who are in the sex trade by arresting their johns because ’women’s bodies in Canada are not their own’ but rather a woman’s body is the ‘property of the state’.  Meanwhile a national woman's magazines carries an article by a new executive woman complaining about the lack of gigalows available for her sexual needs at the end of a work day when she is travelling. And a major Vancouver newspaper carries the several page story of the 50 years prostitute who finds that the 'money' makes the 'work attractive' because she can 'set her own hours' and only bemoans that fact that the younger' competition' can get 10x the rate of pay. The story sounds as much like any aging sports athlete that I thought it would do well to be in the sports pages where the 'body worker's' get paid and complain about the 'young talent' put them out of work middle aged. Meanwhile brain workers like me complain about different shit but try to sound more intelligent about it than they do on the sports pages.  Meanwhile pole dancing, a wholly different matter, is showing up as the latest medical solution to an increasingly gluttonous and slothful generation all the while old men and old women in parliament are devoting their attention to lust in what was once considered a place where the state had no business, i.e. 'the bed rooms of the nation'.  Now the State , which reads your every email, wants to shake down the man who leaves some money under the pillow while claiming that they're really not interested in shaking down the woman that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid the gay man or lesbian that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid even more a 'transexual' that leaves money under the pillow. The language of the bill is so 'sexist' it should cause an adult to retch. No wonder we have "Wrecking Ball" songs.
So the whole feminist ‘my body, my own’ argument goes out the window. Right? Really?
Which may be okay because that was  the pillar that ‘abortion’ was built on. So if the state doesn’t allow women to ‘control their vagina’ and it certainly is already against women being ’surrogate mothers’ for hire in Canada there is no longer any ‘basis’ any longer for "personal' abortion.
Hence from the perspective of ‘pro life’  todays ‘prostitution law’  is truly revolutionary.
Seen otherwise, it would just be more post communist ‘rant’ in an age that is so far beyond bourgeoisie and proletariat.  While these old tenured London School of Economics red  ’sillies’ were squabbling in another centuries debate, usually smoking dope and wearing paisley bellbottom flower power earmuffs, the world moved back to the medieval days with the ’super elite’ new world order. We're no longer in the Beougeoisie and Proletariat wrong ideology but rather we're in the Emperor, Senate, Citizens and Slaves reality.  There’s no proletariat and beougeosie. We’ve devolved politically to a pre Marx reality, all the while the irrelevant ’separatists’ and their other 'ist' die hards, are being used by those who always benefit from ‘divide and conquer’ for their own ends and the stupidity of scaredy cat tenured fat cat academics with their Marxist rhetoric.
Personally, I’m certainly not the emperor and I’m not even a senator. Further my pay cheque excludes me from being a ‘citizen’ because today’s ‘citizenship’ isn’t defined by ‘landowner’ or ‘vote’ but rather a more ‘elaborate’ ’status’ indicator. It’s obviously about ‘money’.  To be a citizen I think one needs first to be a millionaire or multi millionaire but at least a ’net’ millionaire.  I think if you even have to ’think’ about the cost of any purchase you wish to make short of lear jets and rocket ships, you’re not a citizen.  Further, a real 'citizen' can't 'work' in a Marxist sense. They're rather more likely the 'Wolves of Wall Street'. A citizen should 'gamble' for money, perhaps or buy and sell slaves or something but not actually 'make' anything.
I’m a wage slave, myself.  In Russia a ‘worker’ was a person to be admired. Work was admired and skills and talents were admired.  Slaves, like monkeys, are ‘cute’ when they do things but the Chinese emperor had long fingernails because long fingernails are the outward manifestation and symbol of not needing to work.  The elite don't 'work'. They don't 'sweat'.  They 'play'.  In the movie Elysium they were so far above us they lived on space stations.
Corporate leaders today are not ’national’ but ’transnational’ which is why the word ’nation’ has become an adjective.  Corporations can be good or bad but the best make the most money for their stockholders so as Robert Hare says they are judged little differently than we judge snakes and other reptiles. Corporations aren’t ‘warm blooded’. Nations once were or at least aspired to be.  Nations were 'tied' to land and history.  Corporations are unearthly and make history. There is no ‘idealism’ surrounding the ‘brand’ whereas the very word ‘culture’ in its highest form derived from the very best a nation state had to offer. There is no need for 'locality' to corporations. Indeed right now all the wealth of the world is to some extent 'offshore' or 'off world' but specifically 'off the grid'.  There is no privacy in the bedroom but there continues to be no end to the privacy of banks and the elite whoever they may be.
One world order is empiric. Intrinsically it’s digital and paranoid. It’s us and them.
Unfortunately for me, I always feel like a ‘them’.  Indeed even when I’m an “us’ I feel for the ‘outsider’ and working as a physician give myself and my services to everyone irregardless of whether they are ‘us or them’.  Indeed I've been told over and over again by various authorities especially in government that I should treat 'them' in such a way as keep my distance and 'select' the most 'profitable' relationships as opposed to working in the 'old fashioned way'.
The Syrian government and other governments are now arresting doctors who don’t agree with the master race paranoia. Neitze is in and St. Paul is out.   The new fascism says not only Jews require extermination but we all need ‘euthanasia’ because we’re doing the ‘jews’ a favour. Would you want to be a jew, or an ‘outsider’?  Aren’t we being kind to kill them.  Like aborting babies, isn’t this ‘good’. Aren’t we doing the child ‘good’ by protecting it from entering this ‘cruel’ world. Don’t we have to ‘protect’ the ‘planet’ like we would ‘protect the fuhrer’.  The language has shifted but it's still the same old same old. Today the Jew is still the Jew but the Jew is also the gypsey and anyone else who disagrees with, well, you know, disagrees.  Is disagreeable. Doesn't pop a pill to 'feel' good about the 'group think'.
In the end I guess I should be thankful that with the economic crisis continuing my government, in it's wisdom, with these new prostitution laws has perhaps, in it's generosity, offered me the right to prostitute my ass, legally.  Perhaps looking on the bright side, I can hope that they're done with my ass.  They won't even prosecute me for trying to sell my ass, at my age, but if some poor John or, god forbid, a Jane, offers me money for my ass, they're protect me from being 'exploited' by those bastards.
So the trinity of fear, resentment and self pity disturb my peace. I write them down and then hopefully my humpty dumpty ego will feel I ‘listened’ and I heard’ all the fine intellectual arguments that the ‘sky really is falling’ and this ‘really is a steep wall’to fall from.
But gratitude in contrast is all. God is great. So thank you lord for this day. Thank you for my breathing. Thank you for my fingers. Thank you for my dog. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my work. Thank you for my refrigerator with food for breakfast there. Thank you for my shelter this day and my rent being paid this day and all the taxes paid this day in all the hidden and convoluted ways that I am taxed. And thank you for my enemies and thank you for my friends. Thank you for my enemies so that I might better appreciate my friends. Thank you for the rain because the sunshine is so much better. Thank you for the art and industry and technology and all the solutions to all the apparent problems that exist in this ever loving always growing expanding metaphysical spiritual space of coexistence and temporary adventure. Thank you for the sunshine. Thank you for my stomach. Thank you for the coffee I’m about to make.
Thank you for morning pages. Thank you for all your blessings.  Thank you Lord.  Thank you especially today for my ass and my government.  I am so thankful that my government is protecting it from future potential exploitation by scaring away whatever customers I might possibly have ,at my age. I hereby let all and sundry know that I am a prostitute and that if you interact with me, especially younger nubile women, I will expect token financial payment, for which you will be duly rewarded but unfortunately you will be considered a 'john' and subject to prosecution, even if your name is Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie or Ellen Degeneres.  
Now I'll get back to prayer and meditation.  Thank you Julia Cameron for 'morning pages.'  I can  focus on God and Jesus and Creativity and Love and work and gratitude. Thank you.

Lenin Memorial Centre, Ulyanovsk, Russia

This was a remarkable centre. A celebration of a man so important to the Russian People. I couldn’t help but think of the Lincoln Memorial and consider Lincoln and the civil war of the day.  Rebels today consider him and the win in America anathema.  Lenin is that controversial.  Major forces of history and men at the helm.  Great swaths of legalism and political ease.  Thousands dead on an idea or a word. Yet those who survive were part of an awesome time.  In the west we have a shallowness with emotionalism, soccer games and the screaming fans of some child rock star.  These days of Russia were life and death. As if California wanted to secede from the US and Texans decided en mass to stop them. All the absurdity and insanity of politics, people and wars comes to the fore.
I judge as history judges a million miles away. Lenin was a great man.  To the Russians he is what Churchill is to the British, Washington is to the Americans.  John A. MacDonald with all his corruption and foibles is as close as I can come with a comparison in Canada. Certainly he is in a way like Wallace to the Scots but in contrast to Wallace, Lenin succeeded in creating a new empire. He was a builder.  He brought a vast region under central control, created a modern state from what was essentially a medieval kingdom.
There is modern history in this museum too. I enjoyed the wall given to each of the Russia leaders since Lenin. I confess I enjoyed those bits where English was added and I could understand better what I was seeing. Definitely an audiotape tour would be more rewarding. Barrett answered my questions but was delightfully waylaid by two Russian ladies who waxed poetic she said about the Soviet era.  I loved the celebration of the Soviet Space exploration.

Moscow Morning Reflections

If anyone had asked me truthfully what I thought Moscow would be like, I’d have said the buildings would be more utilitarian and block like rather than the ornamentally crafted sculptured architecture that draws from Greece and Rome and French eras in design. I found one sculpture worn and old on a side of a heavy feeling building of workers looking to the sky with their arms upraised. State idealism enforced by design.  I remembered an exhibit of Soviet paintings I saw in Canada being toured around the world. All the plump and hearty looking peasants had the happy looks of the mentally retarded.  Everyone was ‘brain washed’ with that look only ‘cult’ followers about to take their ‘coolaid death drink’ might have.  I had so long heard how all opposition was removed.
Communism was Aetheism’s first political expression as the western world of mixed capitalism and socialism was Christianity’s political expression.  Aetheists had killed more millions in a hundred years than theists collectively had killed in thousands.  I was truly afraid of the forces of fear and conformity that this killing of ones own people represented. Even today I am made thoroughly anxious by American imprisonment of so many of its citizens competing mildly with the history of the Gulag. But these aren’t work camps or Auschwitz but still, though far removed from outright death, worrying nonetheless. No people is free from the collective inanities that have plagued the lowest and highest of civilizations. The very elite of Europe, sophisticated and privileged beyond record gave us WWI and Gallipoli. Mass slaughter houses for the young.
I was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians against Nuclear War back when I belonged to the Canadian Civil Rights Association and Psychiatrists Against Political Abuse of Psychiatry. Yet I saw the worst abuses of psychiatry and politics in my home town and thought organizations were coopted when they refused to look inward as well as outward.  The same is true in military today where ‘friendly fire’ accounts for as many deaths and ‘enemy fire’ yet the paranoids always want to look outward and ignore the enemy within.  So more and more I’ve withdrawn from the insanity of those in politics about, less quick to judge, more respectful of snakes and anthills.  A friend knowing me gave me a lapel pin that said, “beware of stupid people in groups’.  One step ahead of the crowd you are a leader, two steps ahead, a martyr.
I enjoy the churches here.  A history of idealism weighted with politics and yet producing the greatest art of all times. I enjoy looking through the icons to the faces of hope twisted by gravity and real politics.  There are young everywhere and I am thankful for their enthusiasm, even more their laughter. Yet in the church, I see the outward and inner search for meaning in an apparently meaningless world. The only real shrine is the grocery store where ever one goes.  The frivolous is found in the fashion boutiques.  People eat, drink, sleep and mate then live the distractions of children until they can once again face their own irrelevance saved from thinking by the outward demands of their gods on earth, work, children, family, friends. Today these manifest in computers, cars and Facebook.
I was not prepared for all the corporate world fashion and food cultures to be so prominent here in Moscow. I have seen their homogenization the world over.  They were most evident in the Galleria of the Northern Mariana Islands.     Chanel, MacDonalds, Japanese chains, the GUM mall right on Red Square, Tiffany’s,  Salvatore, all the evidence of international corporate efficiency and distributions. These are the lucky charms of the jet setter culture.
In the time of St. Paul, the tent maker, it was no doubt the fabric of your tent and especially one made by that master craftsman artist, “Saul, no Paul, Paul of Tarsis?” “ I  can give you the name of my hair dresser too.  He goes on about this new religion ‘one world religion’, or was it Paul who does that. They’re both very good at what they do. I wouldn’t listen to what they say. Servants are always going on about this and that.”
The motorcycles are Kawazaki, BMW, Honda and Vespas but I even saw a Harley Davidson.  Seeing my own motorcycle represented, despite the immanence of the Germans I felt that Russians did have taste. We always think people who share our tastes, have ’taste’.  I’d expected to see more local Russian motorcycles.  I’d owned a Russian, if only because Canada is more known for its body armour that its getaway vehicles. We’re a stoic slow to mobilize people more defensive in our hockey game than some of the more offensive nations.   My favourite hockey memories of all time have been games between the Canadians and Russians.  There was so much evidence of skill and strategy rather than the all too common brash and brawn.
I had  expected more local manufacturers. I appreciate the unique and delightful  local foods I’ve savoured.  I’ve very much enjoyed  startling touches of ingenuity of dress the Moscow women add to old universal motifs of clothing.  A Moscow woman at night in a ‘little black affair’ does wonders with silk and gold accessories and the almost universal 4 inch heeled even shoes that will ensure podiatrists years of future business.   There is so much creativity and novelty here.   I’d actually expected more  conformity.  The Russia of my youth was boring to say the least.  There was so much that was  grim.  I guess I expected more military presence, fewer long haired men, more women weightlifters on steroids,  maybe a  tank or two in the streets.  it’s so easy to forget that Troudeau in my very own Canada had tanks deployed in our cities as every intellectual secretly desires.   There is an element of cold war in the rhetoric.  Yet today the war is economic and oil.  Ideology is trumped by Samsung phones and Peugeot. It’s really hard to imagine that I was checking the Canadian ’travel bulletins’ to see if it was ’safe’ to travel to Moscow given the international posturing and sable rattling going on amongst the world leaders. Yet, there has always been ‘war and rumours of war’.  I’m so glad I came.  
I am bored nearly to tears to hear the Quebec white hairs talk of “Separatism’ still.  Now the radical Feminists in my country are demanding equal distribution by gender.  There must be an equal number of women on every board and physicists must wear skirts whether they are male or female if they expect to get tenure anymore.  Tokenism has replaced meritocracy and if you have a cousin who is stupid as toast but the right ‘flavour of the month’ then they can be  tomorrows brain surgeon without any demand for training or irritating consideration of such irrelevant details as old fashioned ‘competence’.   Meanwhile the racists demand equal distribution by race. No one cares anymore if anyone can do anything just so long as they ’spout’ the right slogans.  Canada is more communist today than Russia was perhaps at its worst and more and more people, especially men, are being shunted off in Canada for ‘political correctness re education.”   Meanwhile the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful encouraging  the divisionary  tribalism fueled by anyone who can profit by promissory materialism and the idea of ’symbolic specialness’.  Denial reigns all over as we collectively forget about death and disease and hope the latest MRI will be available soon for a whole new range of Selfies. Euthanasia is fine just so long as we can share it on Facebook. We deal with our anxiety about insignificance in Andy Warhol 20 minitism. I confess, quietly of course, that I prefer the Bible to the Kardashian Twins and American Reality TV.
I see no difference here in the people and the world as if all has gone ‘global’ and ‘local’ is lost in the ‘one world order’ some hybrid communist capitalist hegemony of corporate power and elite family wealth.  All is so far beyond my pay grade.   I love that I can enjoy a boat ride down a Moscow canal looking at exotic sights in the company of a beautiful girl.  Sufficient is this day.  I am reminded of Arjuna in Bhagadvagita who says to Krishna that it is  his own family that is fighting on either side in this war.  He knows not what to do. Krishna responds that there will always be war but the question is not which side to join but rather whether to participate or not.
So many young people and old are alienated today.  They are lost in a variety of addictions, such a variety of choices. We are increasingly facing the hazards of abundance while the old people still struggle from a position of scarcity . People die of ‘lifestyle’ diseases more than starvation.  Everywhere there are ‘food banks’ when more and more we need the Third World skinnies to offer international ‘work aid’ for western fatties.  I am aware of my own middle age ponch so at home in America whereas here, obesity is present, it’s not as ubiquitous as mid west America.  Fast food has yet to be the scourge but mostly it’s the everywhere present smoking that shortens the local life while maintaining the appearance of health. Where once there was only politics or soccer,  there is so much variety. Perhaps in future wars people will fight over which video game is dominate. It’s amazing we have been able as a species to accommodate PC and Apple operating systems.  This gives me hope.
 I remember hearing that Communist stores had bare shelves because central planning in 5 year intellectual ‘bits’ could not keep up with the winds of change.  Today that now is dealt with by ‘on line’ shopping and on demand delivery and production.  Times have changed but not as one would think, rather from years to minutes, seconds to nano seconds. There are those on the margins but in the centre there is light speed.  The rat race is now a race of great danes and panthers.  One might think the lumbering bear and lofty eagle just couldn’t keep up with the anonymous hare.
I saw horses, sabres and rifles in the Kremlin today.  I love the ancient display.  I reflected how Churchill rode a horse into Sudan and later faced German unmanned missiles shot across the canal. It is an age of smart guns and smart drones and star wars.
But all this is still  a side show to the universal call of spring. Romance was so evident last evening in Red Square.  Couples walked hand in hand, stopping openly to embrace and kiss. They were surprisingly interested in what each other saying, completely unaware that their very attentiveness was driven by reproductive hormones.  We cry ‘freedom’ when we are most enslaved by biological urges.  I noticed a lack of public washrooms and made a point of remembering as my now deceased aunt once said, “never miss the opportunity to use a washroom when you see one.”   Older I’m more amused today than ever I was in my life before. I have  a comic strip representation running through my mind today so much more appreciative of tragicomedy where once there was only the seriousness of tragedy.    People who cannot laugh are social explosions looking for an excuse for drama.  I was once considered an “intellectual’ and view those days the same as when I was merely drunk on red wine.  There’s even more humility in the latter than the former intoxication.
Life is a muddle and may always have been.  The more certain I am the more aware of uncertainty I become.  There is such diversity now that perhaps we are saved by the multiplicity.  Political writers have said that the old dichotomy is splitting into a new regionalism.  I could not overlook the whiteness of this place. The brown face so rare, the yellow skin quite absent compared to my own Hongcouver Canada. .  I heard that gypsies were a concern and thought of our own “Occupy Movements’.  I was a hippy myself for a summer and wore flowers in my hair in the streets of San Francisco. But we were all about love and shouted ‘make peace not war’. Activism today is so much more about anger and selfies.
I don’t know really.. There is always only vagueness. The Moscow I envisioned was gone perhaps with the fall of the Berlin Wall. America itself died in a way when it lost the love hate romance it had with it’s drab dance partner of so many years.  There is so little evidence of the Moscow we still hear of in our news still.  Yet we hear of military rule in Thailand and millions in the street at the same time a friend has sent me a picture of himself and other I know enjoying their time in a Thailand beach village apparently unaffected by the ‘colour coded movements raging in the media and the cities always so easily full of themselves while country folk would rather picnic more often than not.  “Chill”.
Personally, culturally, socially, fashionably this could be another fashionable neighbourhood in a far eastern Canada.  Somewhere even more different than Quebec.  Russia is just another place in that sense  where they have a funny way of talking and a particularly difficult alphabet.   I just learned the Ethiopians have their own alphabet as well.  I was a little irritated when studying Hebrew I had to learn another alphabet and was particularly incensed by the Greeks when I rented a car and found that their traffic signs were all equally illegible.  How dare people not consult me on such a basic matter as alphabet. Don’t they appreciate that while I learned latin, english, french and some spanish I’m tired after all the science and medicine and legalese and beaurocratese I’ve had to learn that others would think not to include me in their very formation of letters and sounds.   I feel I can tolerate diversity a lot but alphabets are just going too far for me personally.  I want to draw a line , put my foot down, surrender, scream I give up. I need the babble fish now from that classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Each person has their breaking point.  It was the same in Greece where I was irritated that words didn’t sound at all the way I thought they looked. It’s at the level of alphabet one approaches the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. There is this vast illusion in ‘one world order’ and superficial similarities that overlooks the vast differences that can only be held together by a vast measure of love, maturity and tolerance.  I am reminded of a tourist I met in Germany frustrated by ‘currency’ shouting at a bank teller, “I don’t want any more of this coloured money, give me the real green stuff.” I thought he was an ‘ugly american’ but later learned he was just an overwhelmed Canadian from Toronto on the last leg of a many month travel binge thorough Europe.  I find myself that the desires of the Hobbit are increasingly my own despite the many adventures I have had and the spiritual travels I’ve had with my own Gandolf.  I miss smoking a pipe but still enjoy putting my feet up in my own home after I have closed the days.  I look forward to being reunited with my little dog yet I am only days into this differences and alieness. I really think that indoor plumbing, fresh water, clean air, and electricity are under appreciated.
Here the wifi has been intermittent.  I’m mildly irritated by the lack of constant coverage globally with ‘space age’ technology.  Does no one consider me.  I want my WIFI now.  I don’t want to walk next door  to the WIFI cafe.  Really, Beam me up Scotty!  I  take so much for granted and overlook the heated shower I have every day.
Each place has struggled to improve the lot of life for its individuals. This history has shown in it’s superb museums the world over. This desire for improvements  has been associated with war and all its varied tools, the development of increasing creature comforts from hot springs to engraved hair brushes, intellectual achievements in books and art and scientific and technological advances in transportation and construction and search for meaning in churches where questions of contemplation are engaged. There are libraries and factories the world over. I always feel it is a good place where there are more libraries than arsenals.
I love that this is the centre of empire with so much of the highest achievements apparent. Each power centre, all the empires of the world over have their undercarriage of slavery and addiction , but they also have their glorious works of human endeavour, their architectural wonders, their high speed public transport, their space era technologies.  I’ve been to Crete, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, all the major cities of Europe, Bombay, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and London and Washington, following the development of dominance through chariots and cannon and calvary and naval and ultimate air power and then space age communication and satellite surveillance increasingly in an age of robots and drones.  It’s an amazing history of external development.  This is one of those greatest of great achievements and places where people came together in common for purpose only to later reflect and change direction, always slouching towards bethlehem, always moving closer to perfection whatever that might be.  It was still thousands of years ago that the world over the greatests nations concluded that the ‘golden rule’ was ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.  Jesus added ‘pluck the log out of your own eye before trying to take the sliver out of your neighbours.”  Not that anyone listens so each generations we learn again what the previous one knew, and each empire begets another and that one learns all over again. Only now the years are nano seconds.
I am humbled here. That is good.  I’m away from the routines that dictate my life. I’m nobody among strangers.  I only must guard my passport, wallet and knapsack, with computer, iPhone and satellite phone.  I’m reduced to minimalist concerns. There’s a lightness of being. I’m Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris’. Here, in Moscow,  the  word freedom comes from a different alphabet.