Continental Coffee, Commercial Drive, Vancouver

I'm sitting outside the Continental Coffee Shop on Commercial Drive.  The ham and cheese I ordered is delicious.  The regular coffee is even better, distinctive and robust. The atmosphere of the place is decidedly commercial drive, intellectuals conversings at tables beside beautiful people probably hooking up through on line services with the occasional computer geek working on something, or blogging like me.  The young and pretty blond is journalling. I wonder if she's in recovery or just a budding writer.  There's all manner of middle class on Commercial Drive.  Three decidedly gay men walked by with affected speech. An angry lesbian looked at me and smiled blowing all stereotypes. The ethnic Mediterraneans look like retired crime bosses but probably are just grandfathers.  Across the street the Italian Bakery is doing brisk business.  There's Wonderbucks trading company too. I've shopped there when I was furnishing apartments.
Right now I'm thinking of God.  Gilbert is lying on the sidewalk beside me hoping to smell ass.  A particularly attractive young woman just walked down the street with 30's style clothing and bright red lipstick.  I don't suppose she's horrny.  That's a pornography Hollywood myth in my experience.  Old guys sitting with MacBook Air computers at coffeeshops aren't at high risk of being molested even in Vancouver.
In the 60's and 70's the drug scene was more about awakening while today it's more about numbing.  The slogan then was 'Turn On'. Now it could be 'Turn Off".
There is a preponderance of tattoos on the street.  Even Gilbert has one for identification.
God either is or isn't.  The very question implies existence. You don't deny the Holocaust if it didn't exist. There's not a whole lot of folk invested politically in excluding Santa Claus from schools and court rooms.
It's called 'secular religion'.  A polytheism for sure.  Not a monotheism by any means. Rather 'man as the measure of all things' or to be politically correct and decidedly hip, 'woman as a measure of all things'.  All the promises of feminism seem not to have benefitted me and yet like so many causes I supported them.  Now I'm looking for the old dying white guy movement. I feel and think about death a lot these days.  Sickness does that to one.  Mysterious pains and aches and chronic stress combine to make for cracks where fear will enter.  Prayer and meditation stay hysteria.  A problem shared is a problem halved.
My friend George reassured me recently I was still insane.  I was concerned.  If I was sane I'd believe what the media was telling me.  The planet is dying. The world is overpopulated. The government is all thieves. The banks are criminal and lawyers are all nazis.  Communists and atheists are taking over the country and China is spying on bowel movements with nano cameras built into see through bum lulu lemon yoga pants.  The possibilities for fear are endless.
A beautiful long haired summer dressed woman is walking her leash pulling hound.  Gilbert is watching the dog.
God is an idea.  God is also an experience.  I've known spiritual awakenings and experienced the interconnectedness of all creation. I have seen the whole of the periodic table dancing in a whirling matrix about me with all the hidden names of chemistry labelling existence. The greatest of visions and beatific realities predated hallucinogens. Closed materialist psychiatrists attribute all this to early childhood sexual abuse, misfiring of synapses, or any number of explanations suitable for themselves. They're pseudoscientists at best, never appreciating the limits of our knowledge of even gravity. They're more afraid than I am.  That's what 'uptight' is all about. I prefer my friends praying to raise the dead. Why not.  Beats blowing up people with bombs.
An oriental man with red shoes and diamond earrings is talking on his cellular.  The mundane is so deprived of the sacred as to make science anything but holy.  I , like millions before me, have known telepathy. I know twins who knew each others thinking and anticipated calls half a world away. All such phenomena is disregarded by the main stream monetarists.  To even imagine a connection without an 'airway plan for profit' is a threat to the status quo.
God is the central exchange.
God is that hub in which all souls are connected, time is one, and all things impossible are possible.
To me it's called home and I've been too far away learning the things of this world and proving my competence with the heavy manipulations of this lower zone made lighter by the love of man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, children and dogs.  I feel as if I'm in a reality invented by a cat. It's serious that way.  Mario de Beauregaard's "Spiritual Brain', was only necessitated by the lies foisted on us all.  These days they deny the mind and say everything is the brain.  Why not deny God, in time we can deny man and return to pure aggression.
I envied the woman who passed with the long and healthy body moving in a single form fitting fabric like a futuristic dancer having landed in this world for a day of sight seeing. I'd love to John Malkowitch her body and mind and experience reality from a different locus.
God is in all the eyes of the world. We are his and her hands and feet.  God is one and many and , the one many and the many one. There are no words for the paradox.
Talking of God gets one locked up or crucified.  There are too many Christians these days without scars.  All one has to do is tell the truth and all manner of authorities will descend upon you.  The story of Paul is today.
The sun is out and  still I descend into the gloom of yesterdays.  Resentments and fears make up so much of the thoughts that circle the amygdalla like warriors about a wagon train.
She is passing with red hair and dark glasses, a slim but busty body and no need to wear black on this day.
Men used to wear cod pieces that brought one's attention to their genitals.  It is only when their penis is exposed that they become objects of sexuality. Women have done well to clothe men everywhere so that at least they can think in late spring without hormones distracting them any more than they already are.
Men's clothing conceals, mostly sloppy and loose fitting.  At least gay men celebrate their bodies.  The male suit jacket was developed from the design of British war uniforms.  As a man I've felt at war most of my life, competing with others daily, defending rights that are only rights if defended, begging resources promised but not given, refusing to accept the status quo which would have those I care for marginalized and why.  I was little once and fear that when I am old there will be no one there to help me.
But God.
I was in a hospital with a dangerous sadistic nurse.  She is memorable and yet all the others I have known so much more positively cannot erase the experience of her abuse of power.  But abuse of power is ubiquitous.  It's a subjective state in a greater whole and what Job was written about in the Bible.
My relationship with God is sadomaschistic.  The story of Jesus is one of faith and denial.  I have more faith in God than I do in myself.  I'm a regular Jonah refusing to go to Ninevah.  I'd rather be in Yaffa.  How many whales have I been swallowed by and how many times have companions felt threatened in my presence.
IA young girl walked by wearing a pink shirt "Love who you are."
My seat is bouncing for Gilbert is meeting another dog behind me and his leash is attached to the chair.  Now passing I see this was a pug.
There is a book of biblical Hebrew I need to study for this evening. I've a lesson to prepare and yet would rather look at  two pretty women scantily dressed walking proudly down the street.  "People watching" in Arabian countries must be boring in the extreme. Feminists loved to flaunt themselves in the day and then blame men for looking, before the lipstick feminist set made mockery of the their older dirty silly sisters.
I'd like to be at a nudist colony. I could go to wreck beach and see the phallus as privileged as the breasts of the city are.  The breast prominence is accentuated by all manner of wire and engineering. Stanfields offer me no such assistance.  No wonder men ride Harleys, yet women seem only interested in the cost of such machines and sociobiology prevails.  The egg is more dominant in behaviour.  I am reduced to the behaviour of my sperm.  Sociobiology is so much richer than the mythology of Marx.
A Harley has just driven by and I am aware I could be driving mine on a country road right now.
Instead I am here talking to God, thinking about God, conjuring God, praying for God, meditating on God.
Sexual orgasm is a sensation.  In my material world scale it's more exciting than a bowel movement or a pee but to one who has suffered limitation of either sex holds no comparison.  Sex can't compare with making money for the financially insecure or for someone who has been poor and equated poverty with powerlessness.
I've had ample opportunities and been blessed again and again by Grace. Luck is said to be God acting anonymously.
The sins represent excesseses.  Amorality revolves around sins.  Our laws speak most to sins.
There is the sin of gluttony.  All over the rich are obese and yet so are the poor.  Not perhaps in times of famine.  Historically some meat, like the physique of Marilyn Munroe has been preferred to anorexic Twiggy as defines against disease and famine.  Now our western world dies of excess. The narcissism about food acts out in all manner of variations, cook books, epicurean delights, restaurants, vegetarianism.  There's a regular pornography of culinary indulgence.
Yet, Jesus said, "man does not live by bread alone".  And so few fast when fasting was as sure a route to knowing God as prayer and meditation.  "Could I have a latte and a cucumber sandwich on whole wheat and flax bread, if I fast?"
Sex is dirty to the glutonnously filthy who have lost the feeling below their mouth and insist their daily involvement to all else in their 'taste' and 'gut sensation' is 'necessary'.
Crap.
But yes, the experience of a good bowel movement is increasingly appealing to the aging population whose daily ritual is to look forward to meals. Not so much for social conviviality as the respite from thoughts and memories.
Sloth is another favourite sin these days with unemployment, welfare, rest, vacation, leisure, and sleep and all manner of industry related to the bed and couch and lazy boy.  Disability is another industry which revolves around late night preoccupation and late day rising.  Inefficiency is disregarded and whole government agencies are devoted to promoting a lethargy of sloth that all insist is necessary. And may even induced or coerced. As some who really would do other are obligated to join this 'state' of affairs for political gain ultimately of others, not themselves.  They have their reward in sloth.
And there my mind slips into criticism and negativity.
I turn to God to lift me from the malaise of thought which begs for something to gnaw on as many seek 'no mind'.
Gilbert has been petted quite a bit by passers by. He's enjoyed his time. I just realized my meter must have run out
But my meter calls to me.  It measures time.
God may I know you better today and be more with you.

Over One Hundred Thousand Visits to this Blog

Thank you all for reading, especially for your comments, and feedback. I really do appreciate it and feel very blessed.

There's apparently been over a hundred thousand visits to this blog with something like 130,000 page views.

When I started this blog three years ago I was so excited when someone read my first post. Then I was really really joyful when friends began to join. I think I was moved at ten thousand views. I didn't quite understand it. I have this read out that said people from all over the world were reading my blog. I thought that was incredible. I would look at this map for a bit comparing what I wrote with whether more East Europeans were interested or not.

I added the advertising at some point. I have over many years done pro bono work and given my time freely wherever there was a need. As I've got older and with the economic times as they've been I've tried very hard to be more of a grown up. So the advertising was that sort of thing. As it turned out my blog was 'used' and 'violated' by countless advertisers but I never received a 'cent'. There were a whole slough of conditions. People had to actually buy something or click on an ad or something small printish, beastial and clever.It was interesting. I liked that some machine out there could figure that when I wrote something about pillows people who read it might want a mattress.

I mostly struggle these days to find ways to reduce the incredible tax burden I've been under all my life. The government patronage and free hand outs to their 'favourites' have over time got to me as I've no say in this 'favouritism' yet am indeed the benefactor of all these folk whether they are corporate leaders or streetside bums. All of them treat me with disdain as a kind of 'mark' and at times the 'vote' my taxes gives endorsing government has me wanting to not work. But I love work and mostly what the government does is satisfactory. So I think if I'm trying to make this blog a 'business' and my writing has over the years been a source of income and a 'business'. Perhaps, I think trying to think cleverly like business and government peopole,  I'll be able to 'write off' something. Years back an accountant told me about this 'write off' thing.  I've been very impressed at how rich people rarely pay taxes because so much of what they do or have is a 'write off'.  Similiarly I've been so impressed that government workers can 'hide' the true value of their incredible wealth in indexed pensions, health and dental care, travel allowances and all manner of freebies that added together make them millionaires.  I've thought about it a lot but mostly it's not reduced my tax burden anymore than any one else not writing.  I just do  so much pro bono work in all aspects of my life.   "Smart" people "take' and 'stupid' people give when it comes to business and money.  The fact is I'm 'envious' of these 'smooth operators' and 'cannabalistic' clever folk. I forget to ask what's in it for me at the bottom line of money and wealth and prestige.  I usually am satisfied that what I've done is 'good' and the 'right thing'.  Yet I learn such considerations rarely hamper the actions of so many I know.

I also thought about the 'freeware' idea and sharing ideas like we do as scientists so I thought my blog would contribute to 'truth' with my ideas honed from experience having some validity and being valuable for that. It seems that has been the case though I did find that very 'clever' colleagues were using my writing and quotes and such and including them in their cleverly orchestrated books for profit and self promotion. Several have over the years phoned or emailed me and asked for my permission to use material I've shared freely for which they'll profit but that's only told me how many are indeed doing this without acknowledgement. When I look for my material on the internet it's literally everywhere, sometimes in free journalism, with it's own advertising revenue or for profit enterprises.  I find that interesting.  I've had this happen hundreds of times to date and seen my 'ideas' and even my medical reports as the basis of others very expensive medical legal reports. The fact is I myself am using the 'ideas' of C.S. Lewis, Einstein, Montague, Thatcher and Clinton without consideration of source on a regular basis. Ideas are part of what Jung called the 'collective unconscious'.

The creative copy write is a difficult process given the common ground. I think there's merit in this because 'artists' . mystics, writers and all those other creative people are commonly 'used' by more business minded folk with the agenda of seeking money rather than beauty or truth.   The starving artist motif doesn't bother them one bit just so long as they get theirs.

I realize  that in the eyes of some of my colleagues in different fields, I'm like an amateur sexaholic taking business away from the street prostitutes who rely on their trade for their income.

I thought about the advertising a lot and procrastinated about doing anything about it. Here were these people putting billboards up all over my various lawns and promising to pay me, and wanting me to work for them.  Since then never paid on their first promise I became somewhat skeptical about who was profitting. Somewhere along the chain there were fat cats and I was probably a 'mouse' in their jargon. Now I think they owe me $20 or a $120 but I don't have their industry or machines to go after that at this moment. I've more important things to do like writing this.

The fact is I like writing. I've loved editors and publishers. I've done both but haven't particularly liked it. I 'm apparently good at it. When I've done this stuff for others it's been incredibly well received.  As an editor I apparently can kill half formed babies with the best of them leaving only the healthy bits for the reader.  I haven't had much of the same desire to do this to my writing runts.

What I like is writing. For decades before it was fashionable I kept journals that no one read.  I've thousands of pages in boxes and lost thousands of pages in divorces where the ex's destroyed my writing as so much junk.  I've an artist friend whose ex wife burnt dozens of  his canvas.  The courts put no value on creativity in this way or register the violence that one does to dreams.  Only some violence makes public record.

I like sharing ideas too. I like recording events. I like playing with words. I love all the creative 'stuff", stuff of writing and I like other writers. So blogging has been a marvellous 'journal' which I've shared with other. I've been concerned at times about the 'transparency' but then as I got older I found that there were a lot of 'lies' being told about me. Indeed one of my enemies (or friends for all I know) said I was dead and had a city I'd lived in with a whole lot of friends believing it.  I found a blog was a way of maintaining at least the appearance of life and challenging the individual who would kill me as an idea, if anything.

The greatest risk of the media today is that it will quote out of context, cherry pick or show selectively biased bits to work their 'story' whatever their story will be.  I like that there's this deeper more extensive record of my life that shows it's rather unlikely I've been devoted my time to the end of the world.  Like most people I have a rather ordinary life with it's own peculiarities.  Working as a psychiatrist I've seen that most people have mostly ordinary lives but it's the spin that they or others put on their lives that make them individually extraordinary. So many people do lead 'lives of quiet desperation' and often people are stumbling about in 'survivor mode' from one chaos or other.  When people share they find that they're not so alone and often that many others share the same views. By sharing my thoughts I've shared that yes I may be crazy or no I'm not crazy or whatever. When I was younger I was much more concerned about my 'thoughts'.  Masturbation was an especially concerning thought.  And thoughts of wanting to run through the halls of the school.  I was thankful when I heard that line in a song.  Oh I thought I'm not alone. Like the book "little prince' so much of what we do is to get beyond the alienation.  Often all we do is say hello.  I'm learning from Jared Daimond's work on tribalism and the development of civilization why people are so afraid of strangers.

 My work has had me confronting disease in individuals, schools, universities, and governments. In time I've always been 'vindicated' and invariably some 'bully' falls but I'm never rewarded. Indeed bullies have friends and the corruption seems often to just morph into another corruption so as I've got older if anything I've regretted any fighting I've done. Even now I'm condemned for 'advocating' for my patients 'too much'. Sins of commission are highly frowned on in Canada but sins of omission are rewarded, hence the gross negligence that permeates our health care system. Those who question it are called any number of names. Everyone is vulnerable. These days 'racist' is a common term. I caught a thief and sociopath only to be called 'sexually harassing'. The sociopath thief went free and was rewarded whereas I was punished severely even though I'd sexually harrassed no one.  My crime as it turned out was my very existence.

I don't understand the morality or ethics of this but have found it all helps my prayer life and my relationship with God. Often I want to go home rather than go to work and face the dangers the bureaucracy has put up to perpetuate sickness and to take advantage of the already ill. I actually was told by a senior bureaucrat 'the patient is the enemy, you're do better when you understand that."

 I have tended to see God in strangers and asked myself how would I want to be treated or how would I want a family member treated. This is not at all 'clever' or 'profitable' thinking. Business models are adversarial to a large extent and the 'client' is the 'enemy' except in some enlightened realms. The idea is how to get the most for the least and now as I look around at those 'clever' colleagues I once thought less of I see them taking early retirement or living in fine homes and I frankly can't say my 'sacrifice' and 'holier than thou' thinking or 'rewards in heaven' was particularly wise. I'm happy and content but I don't know things like I once knew things. My certainty has gone with experience and knowledge. When I encounter any fanatic I tend to think 'ignorance'. Only in ignorance can we be truly passionate unless it's on behalf of love. I like Leonard Cohen.  In so many ways my life has been coloured by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot.   They're all  passionate for love. That's the artist.

The joke goes that when bankers get together they talk about art and when artists get together they talk about money. The grass is always greener over the fence. We want what we don't have. Even now I'm thinking about breakfast whereas I was a moment ago thinking about writing. Blogging has been fun. One kind person said I should separate my blogs into 5 blogs. There's the serious one. Then there's the sexy one. Then there's the personal one etc. They were big on organization and I admired that their blog and their life was separate like that. But I was like that as a family physician. I told people about their weight and didn't think that I should exercise as well. Now I'm not a walking image of health and as I compare an obese gym teacher with a non obese gym teacher, if both are saying the same thing, then frankly I'd like the model of health. I think the philosophers of ancient greece and most of the history of the world except a small hundred years of the age of 'intellectualism' asked that there be some coherence between what people said and what they did.

Interestingly I wrote 'fiction' , some erotic stories, only to have these used legally against me as 'evidence' of my wanting to have oral sex with a woman. So there I was being 'tried' on the basis of my 'fiction' and frankly it wasn't anything that Harlequin Romance hadn't published 25 years ago. However  there was this powerful and pompous 'censor' condemning me based on her lack of boundaries between separating reality and fiction.  Just because I wrote in a fictional account about cunnilingus didn't mean I thought about cunnilingus in another setting. Yet Jesus did say what we thought was important. So the 'Secret' as evidenced by "Oprah" would clearly suggest that Steven King and Tarantino should at least be hung in the public square for their negative contributions to our collective thought. I love that Little Sisters has fought these vainglorious 'censors' for years.  I just wish that Little Sisters could get on with the job of selling books to adults and not have to deal with the sorts of people who hide behind courts and committees to get priority exposure to pornography to be disgusted by it and insist others don't see it. I frankly don't care but I've studied history and know even today the Bible is still censored around the world. That's the problem with 'censorship'. Just look at a list of what communist countries have censored and you'll see why I don't trust even the Canadian government to know good literature and new ideas from the limits of their own IQ. Einstein and Gandhi and Jesus would all have been censored by Ottawa or Victoria. There's a need as Jefferson saw for 'separation' of powers. That doesn't mean I should 'separate' my blog. I've been told by wiser minds I should use a pseudonym too but haven't.

This mars edit no longer maintains the 'formatting'. So when I press publish I have to then go through and create paragraphs. It defeats the 'first draft' joy of blogging. I liked that my blog was 'uncensored' and reflected the stream  of consciousness. I figure someday I might go and edit them and create a tidy liftle bit of 'second draft' or 'thirties draft' writing but the idea of a 'blog' is its immediacy. It's not a 'grand work' It's to me like the 'artist's' journal. I know that to others its something else but the idea of a blog is. if they want that sort of thing, then they can go to the trouble of making that themselves. Also because there's billions of blogs out there you can find one you want to read. That's why I'm thankful and a bit surprised by all those who've read whatever it is I've written.  Or maybe they've just liked the pictures. Whatever, it's touching and appreciated.

I was told no one wants to read something so long and convoluteed. Clearly today's style of writing is 'brief'. Friends are back to writing haikus. The scottish 'rant' or the 'English' rave are no longer relevant to the fast times. I like the executive summaries BBC gives the the news but I do sometimes read a friends three page epistle. Mostly no one reads these ends of these blogs. I don't feel like I've cheated when I just read the opening paragraphs of a blog and never get to the end. I'd feel this way with a book. Sometimes I do scroll to the end of a blog to see if theres been an about face or the things remained consistent. It's odd though to consider over a hundred thousand have looked at  the ramblinggs or even looked at the picture.

Today though a thing can go 'viral' and suddenly a million people are looking at your picture of your cat. Humans are odd. I don't know if Shakespeare would go 'viral' as quickly as 'Cheech and Chung'. I still love the symphony but know that it's not funded nearly as well as most rock bands. The same as the income of ballet dancers versus strippers. There's no doubt that the ballet dancers, the males at least, and the women with breast implants, would make far more if they were dancing and stripping but they are ballet dancers and not strippers for a reason. That seems to show the limits of the our present monetary system. It appeals to the base and raises the question of why?

I learned that because I didn't value my writing and gave it away for free it wasn't considered as 'valuable' as another person who put a very high price tag on their writing. I loved therefore hearing Ian Weir say he was writing a book for one reader.  I thought of Narnia being written for his children and the Lord of the Rings being written for the family. My best love poem was written for my lover. I shared if after we broke up because then it wasn't ours alone. Our love had been dragged through the courts and reduced to the shit of passage that it had become. I wanted to keep the memory of the flowers we ate that first day instead.

Time to go. Gilbert wants a walk. I'm as confused as ever. My certainties lies elsewhere. Lord, I love you. Thank you for all, the alpha and omega and all the alphabet of existence, the symbols and signs and all that is behind, before and around everything and nothing. Guide me in all my actions. Be with me always and let me know your presence and show me what it is I can do to be the best I can be and serve you and my community as best I can.

And thank you for all who still read and particularly those who are kind enough to read my blog or at least look at the pictures.