Healing Anger, Whores and Saints

Laura is looking after Gilbert.  Friends are watching my home. Anything worth anything is in my storage locker or here on me. I dazzle with tech.  Apple bling.  I am off work.  I’m off the clock.  20 years ago I chose life.  The woman in my life then had tried to kill us and me.  The woman before her had killed my baby. Drinking and smoking I had fallen in with a desperate lot. When a friend suggested I quit drinking and smoking I thought I’d prove to him I didn’t have a problem.  “I’d show him.” I had returned to the church because it had been there I remembered the good days. It had been there where I’d heard the calling to go into medicine. It was good to be on my knees praying. I’d meditated for so many years. Praying was good. Crying and remembering and knowing that it was highly unlikely anyone was going to get drunk,  smoke dope, shoot guns, or have an orgy. The church was a safe place. I was invited to go with a new friend to a 12 step meeting.  I didn’t want to work then. I felt responsible for the deaths of my wives. I felt that the abortion had been beyond my power but I was blamed for it. I thought that my professor who’d used me for sexual gratification and taken advantage of me. I felt a whole lot of self pity. I felt a lot of anger and resentment too.
Now they asked me to talk on anger at this conference.  I’ve talked here before.  I always hope they’ll forget. I don’t think I talk well.  I once did.  But not anymore.  Mostly I doubt myself.  But then I see how little others know and it seems I’m still okay.  I’m useful. Increasingly an old elephant in a country where the government hires poachers. I keep seeing my colleagues being taken out by the demonic.  Some strongman with the young around him, puppets, with strings attached. I don’t know what happened to my strings. I’m just glad I made it another year. I’m crawling into home plate, tears running down my cheeks.
It’s been tragic year. My brother died. My best friend in so many ways died.  My best doctor friend, my best Christian friend, my best recovery friend.  My other best friend of the same ilk grows yearly more ill.  Then my other young friend dies.  The Landlady was a real greedy ugly clever business woman.  I meet more of them. Women who didn’t play team sports. Feral.  Insectoid.  They use men. On Facebook the silly sorts talk about narcissists and psychopaths and sociopaths and they don’t know. I’m there are day. I loved Snakes in Suits.  Looking back at my career I fought them over and over again.  Hitlers and Stalins in clown masks.  Always I knew the problem was me.  My fear is the world I see.
I long to get off this plane at the destination and see a familiar face. My same time next year colleagues.  I find such comfort and solace with dozens of other psychiatrists who share the language of the heart.  I am so tired of being around people who chop off the heads of others to make themselves taller. I’m tired of the competition and the rat race. I turned 65 and stayed. I bought a truck to anchor me in a debt. I’m buying a new home. I’ve the money in the bank but if I spent it the government would take 70% but everyone is glad to bet on my future. I have insurance.  These are things. I just want to move onto the next dimension in time but all my talk with God remains the same with the message to stay, to work, to carry on. I want to be in my sailboat in the Atlantic fighting waves I can see not being stabbed in the back by lying psychopaths who I’ve tried to help and treated as warm blooded creatures hoping and praying they would revive but they’d bit the hand that feeds. The whole loser coward money grubbing arrogant monday morning quarter back set are there to judge. They no longer can do. They’re gloriously incompetent and need to give themselves pats on the back and lots of raises and hang together while they make insane and impossible demands that are the height of silliness.  Insectoid. I pray for them. I pray at their backs.  Their platitudes and superiority and grandiosity are shallow.
The National Post wrote the article what is the difference between the Government of Canada and the the Hell’s Angels.  I like the Jesus stories. It’s the government that errs.
I was asked to talk about anger. Not anger management. The bastards, my friends, I suspect, know something.  I live in a sandwich of slices of homicide and murder with the littlest bit of lettuce between. My mind is a ping pong ball.  I slide into this meeting, slouch into the meeting and somehow rally. Every year for 20 years it’s the same.  I want to give up on my fellow man. I want to go out and killing like Arlo Guthrie kill. I’m a sniper. I’m a chemist. I have countless poisons readily available to me. I have skills and knowledge.  I don’t scare myself. But then the violently insane are more afraid of me than I of them.  I thought Hannibal Lechter was the only psychiatrist portrayal of any validity. The new Sopranos girl is a counsellor. A ego massage therapist. I got in trouble ,the umpteenth time calling my colleague a mental whore, insisting I’d not care if he was an escort but his street slut behaviour was no good for the profession. I was wrong. He’s in leadership today.  Lust surpasses love in the world today. Truth is relative.  The silliest don’t know they’re in the experiment. I’m in God’s brain like Malkovitch.
Today’s music sucks. I’m listening to the music of my teens and twenties again and understanding where my influences came from. Doystoevsky, Allan Watts, Kierkegard, Camus, Kaffka, Paradigm shifts, Story of One, National Geographic, the Bible, Francis Bacon, Science of Fear, Future Shock, HG Wells, Churchill, EE Cummings, Franny and Zooey.  I grew up reading these and now talk to people who quote people magazine.  Or did. They’re now reading O Henry and I’m reading Star Trek. I’ve devolved.  Facebook is an entertainment.  The serious are paid and propagandize.
I like Jordan Peterson. I like freedom of speech. I fear we’ll facing the destruction of the free world by the tyrannies of dead communist doctrine wedded to the other great tyranny dead Islam.
Here in the air port there are some pretty girls.  There are fat old men, like me.  Children and back packs.  Jet set.  There’ no glamor.  It’s work to go through security. I ‘ve come down from the adrenaline rush. They’ve ojected to my guns and taken so many knives and nail scissors off me.  Half dressed and dis oriented I have left my passport or my ticket at the security cheque.  I’m back in school being caned and strapped and screamed at.  I can’t get a lather up when a princess says she was traumatized by a man looking at her.  I see the torture victims in my work and challenge anyone to say these people weren’t emotionally abused and physically and mentally abused.  There’s a oneupmanship in the self pity challenge test.  My emotional abuse needs all the public health care and I can’t be concerned about your cigarette burns and broken bones and missing limbs. I’m emotionally abused.
And the richer the person is the more they can get.  I love the picture that showed a trailer park and said that if the the guy in 50 Shades lived in a trailer on welfare it wouldn’t be a book but an episode of criminal minds.
I relax here. We sit in small groups and talk. The guys and girls tell of their spouses and children with cancer.  The widowed and divorced and diseased share their experience strength and hope.  I feel so utterly self centre and useless. My life is blessed beyond belief but I’ve lived the year with a man threatening my life and the life of my dog and no matter how many ways I block his calls or his emails he finds a way to get in my face and laugh at me….he’s living proof that I have no security. The police did nothing. It wasn’t just me. He threatened lawyers and their dogs and the beurocrats and frankly I rather enjoyed that the beurocrats were threatened.  They likely took years off work and milked it for all it was worth.  So far from reality and yet sickness still get through all the barriers to their space station ivory towers. Even now there’s a new threat and they celebrate it and hate doctors all the while claiming they don’t but there Capos and get good coin to lead us to the gas chambers. Middle management.  But this week the police called concerned because he’s threatening the Prime Minister. I don’t know if the PM has a dog. Muslims don’t like dogs so I doubt it. Maybe his kids will be threatened but they are taking it seriously. The rest of us don’t count.  Yet if I or the lawyer or the eurocrats uttered threats we’d be out of work and in jail but this man and the PM are both above the law. I work with people who tell me of the murders and tortureds they’ve done selling drugs, pushing drugs, in prisons and in gangs.  It’s a slice of reality that doesn’t officially exist.
Some days I’m out in the suburbs.  Its different there.
I miss Hank. I miss Bernie. I miss Doug.  I miss Mom and Dad and my brother Ron, and George and Richard.  I remember my Dad lonely in the end saying, “all my friends have died.” He was old and missed my mother. I love when I dream of them. I love too when I dream of the dogs.
‘I think of sex changes. I think of Leonard Cohen. “I want a new Face.”
I think of turning states evidences, walking into Ottawa RCMP and telling them the good men I know. I know that the good are now the bad, the white is the new black, that 1984 doublespeak is the new Canadian, we live for Taqikya. I need a niqab.  “This face is covered up with age and shame.”  I sing hallelujah.
We stand together our heads bowed and say the Lord’s prayer.  More and more with say the Serenity Prayer of the great christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The people who want to change the outside because they can’t face their own insides haven’t knee jerked objected to Niebuhr yet. They attack Jesus.  Christians are the most persecuted in the world.  You’d think they’d like it.
But we’re slow to anger. That’s the distinction I like about Christians. I turn my cheek 70 times 70 times. Then your life is mine.  I can and will wipe out your genetic signature.  It’s the genius of my scotty dog. The ultimate rodent killer.  I like the celtic blood.  Irish and Scottish.  A lawyer with the help of government stole millions from my grandfather.  He then escaped to a place where lawyers lives outside the law.
Maybe next year they’ll anger management.  When I trained with Elizabeth Kubla Ross I understood the anger. I’m angry at God. I’m still trying to do what I’m supposed to do, questioning meaning and purpose. The great psychiatric text was ‘Denial of Death’.  I loved when we discussed these books and shared them  Now the only question people ask is ‘how much did it cost’.  No one understands there is no price on my dog.
Asked if the woman would have sex for a million dollar, she said maybe, so the man asked ‘what about a dollar’.  What do you take me for she said. That’s been decided, now I’m just dickering for price.  I feel like I’m back in Morocco with camel traders.  I want to withhold my services and remove the gun that says we can’t say we say the price of your life or sanity or medication is what ever we say because your fees and your bills have exponentially escalated with no increase in quality or service while our education and expectations have skyrocketed and all these parasites have latched on like blood suckers ordering us to work for them as they siphon off the fat.
These two sisters , teens are so enthusiastic, travelling. Young. I’m jaded and look for spinning tires to back at. The modern windmill.  My dog and I charge the free way. He’s one eyed.  I’m biker trailer trash.
The bastards asked me speak on anger.
Not enlightenment. Not genius. Not sainthood.
Anger. The pricks.
Now all I want to do is get to a room and sleep and shower and watch tv and order meal service but instead I’ll sit and drink coffee with some old guy and learn or some old girl and learn. And I’ve been blessed to know Tony and Art and Beth and Judy and Dave and Julia and Steve and Carol and the list goes on.  I look forward to seeing a gay man whose missed his death several times and a man who was in a series of accidents but he survived. I met the man with a mechanical heart. Interesting eyes.
Now they’ll be calling .I must go.

So Long, Marianne

I am not normally moved when I hear of celebrity deaths.  Celebrities are a world away from my local concerns. Everyone in the news is mostly like the Greek Gods and Goddesses of olden days. Above my pay scale and in a different realm.  Priviledged and talented or corrupt. I never know.

I enjoy the product but I don't get into the 'behind the scenes' world.  I am amused at the Soap Opera and smile even more at those who read all about the actors and actresses.  Yet occasionally I'm touched especially when I meet someone, like I did recently, meeting Crosby of Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Meeting him I appreciated his music and contribution even more.

Leonard Cohen, his words and music,  have been apart of my life since childhood. I first heard his earliest songs sung by Jim Donahue at Wise Eye Coffeehouse.  I heard his first album when I was a teen ager staying over a night with a couple of  blond ski instructors in Banff Alberta.  I read his poetry first at Vincent Massey when I'd been sent to the library on detention.  I learned his song and sang them playing guitar for years, loving most the poetry.  I was truly moved  hearing and seeing Leonard Cohen in person one infinitely memorable performance in Winnipeg.

So Long Marianne has died.  I never knew her.  The song is a part of my youth and life.

My own friend Marianne always came to mind when I heard Leonard Cohen or anyone else sing this song.  So many people sing Leonard Cohen's songs.

My friend.  Marianne is the most beautiful willowy blond, a Joni Mitchell creation with a Neil Young, Heart of Gold. She's brilliant as creation.  We're all older now. Marianne's children are adults,  independent,  original, a blessing, a testament to the love I saw given them when they were young.  Marianne, is a mother bear of a mom.  Her cause was always the vulnerable.  I think of Marianne when I hear Leonard Cohen singing.

Hearing that Leonard Cohen's Marianne has died I'm reminded we're all older. Listening to him sing So Long Marianne I was taken back to my youth when I really did love like there was no tomorrow. Now I'm lost and limitted missing that young and crazy fool who wore flowers in his hair and really believed that 'love would conquer all'.  When I heard the word love, too, I thought of the women I knew.  I knew such peace and joy in their company.  It was sacred in a way Leonard Cohen's words and music were.

I don't think of celebrities much.  But sometimes.  When the daily struggle that is now my life wistfully hearkens back to laughter and  innocence.  So Long Marianne. Live long Leonard Cohen. Your words and music are already immortal. Hallelujah!



                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Remembrance Day

This morning is a hard start.  Hard start refers to an engine that won’t turn over.  It refuses to spark.  I’ve slept in.  First time in months.  Usually I’m in this robotic routine that gets me up and out of the house to work approximately on time.  Thousands of days of work. Thousands of before dawn days.  Today the sun is shining.
I got up and moved to a chair to meditate. My mind wasn’t on God, or Peace or Bliss. I wasn’t ‘mindful’.  I wasn’t even able to focus on prayers.  My soul had attention deficit disorder.  The monkey mind staggering through its various concerns.  Nothing compelling. Just distracting. No energy apparently to focus.  I lack the passion for God. I want my bed instead.
I am the monk who went back to bed.  
I napped on the couch.  Eventually,  the dog, impatient,  climbed all over  me.  I'm a dog mat.  He  licked my face.   Alright, already.
I got up again.  I let mutt out.  It's a crisp day.  He peed,sniffed,looked about and came back in when I called.
I have the day off. A tabala rosa day.  Remembrance Day. November 11.
Remembrance Day.  My father was RCAF.  World War II Royal Canadian Air Force.  Thanks to the sacrifice of the soldiers I’ve lived  a life of relative peace dealing only with self righteous smug and power abusing bureaucrats rather than facing the more judgemental nature of bullets and bombs.  All I have to complain about is the silly grade school officiousness of the stupid and arrogant.  Elsewhere, outside of Canada, children are being killed by random suicide bombers with bad hair and bad attitudes. Mothers and fathers are keening.
I remember my father at the cenotaph.  I was with Laura then.  The RCMP were resplendent in red serge.  Dad was proud to be among his fellow soldiers. He was a west coast bomber in WWII.  He said they  thanked him for bombing a submarine.
“I think it was a whale”, he said. The fog of war.  The humility of my father.
I’m thankful for the privilege of the years working with Veterans Affairs. I saw the old men and women,   heard their stories of being young.   They told me they knew no better than to do as they were told.  They followed orders and nearly died rescuing friends.   It was a hellish time.  They were heroes.  They held their heads high.  They knew the meaning of friendship.  They had solid values. Their houses were built on strong foundations.
Now the veterans I see are more often from forgotten wars of other countries where petty tyrants fought their neighbours, all of it more like medieval jousts with people as peasants.    They saw no glory in their service. Their countries have forgotten them. Regimes have changed.  They escaped.  They live here now.  In Canada.
Here the silly and stupid  forfeit the very rights my father fought for.  The leaders made promises. They've reneged on them now.  They hide behind  the fashion political correctness. They're all up the skirts of girls using them as puppets.
“We’ve aborted more of our own people than the Nazi killed in the war,” she said.  The nihilism of the atheism of our secular age is so in contrast to the robustness of the last generation.   I look around and see the  Germany or Russia of  1930’s.  Except we have shopping malls.  The cathedrals and temples go empty but the parking lots are full.
Dad believed in the working man.  He didn’t know his creed was ‘meritocracy’.  Reward those who work for the common good.  He actually liked the politicians of his day.  Mother celebrated the city leadership.  There was a pride in achievement.  They worried about the greed of their neighbour and were furious about the encroaching taxes. Overall they enjoyed life.  They were  family.
 I was a part of family, still am, even though I fall apart.   It's just the way I'm wired or maybe it comes with my work.   The existential angst.  The scream on a wood cut bridge.  I have some sort of spiritual seizure disorder. I see myself flailing about when everyone else seems a happy cabbage in the happy cabbage patch.
Right now I've attached my discontent to growing old. I could as easily stick it on a political party or a winter season, a lover or just about any fact of life.
Who is that hairy white bearded straggly haired wrinkled thing I see in the mirror.
I don’t think my father wondered at the mirror. His was a more accepting bent.  He complained about the aches and pains of labour but he wasn’t concerned with mirrors. His wasn't a selfie generation.  The facade was critical.  Their generation had the lawns and picket fences. Ours has plastic surgery.  No one is without pretention.  Even the priests like their gold laced robes.
I’ve saved a lot of lives.  I’ve been present and trained for a lot of crisis, emergency and mystery. I’ve repeatedly, thousands of times now ,convinced people not to die, either by cutting out something, physically tying off something, stopping the actual bleeding or starting up the lungs again by thumping on a dozen chests or more.  Sometimes I just took away a bottle of pills, or  hid the knifes. I've been forever convincing people it’s worth it to live.  I've fought morbidity and mortality daily sometimes hourly for 35 years.   I do hope I'm right.
When I die I could meet a whole lot of angry people in paradise hating me for keeping them in their jobs and marriages, paying taxes and supporting the latest liberal regime.  In that personal nightmare of mine it doesn't matter how you got 'there' .  There are no conditions. You just have to get out of 'here'. The babies are the greatest winners in that afterlife. In that dream I'm the greatest evil there is. Satan selling life in this materialist secular Platonic shadow world when over the hill in the promised land, with no conditions. Unconditional love for all. Kill yourself and you still get a harp. Everyone has a personal cloud. There is no hell.  No hell. No purgatory. No loss or grief. But rather you awake in wonder and hate that 'fucking psychiatrist' who kept you chained to misery all those years.  And here I thought I was a saviour when really I was nothing more than a prison guard making sure everyone filled their allotted sentence, my own fear of death, holding others here.
Mostly these days I use all my training in motivation, analysis, hypnosis and pharmaceuticals to convince people to let go of the needle. I counteract the slavery of the pin prick.  It's all in the ritual. The blood letting, the injecting, the heating, the transaction, the sleep, the passion to avoid the pain.  The myth of Sissyphus. And then again the vultures come to pluck at the eyes of another Graecian hero.  They’re as fixated on their self made myths as my dog is fixated on his yellow tennis ball.  Their lives are reduced. Obsessions.  Compulsions.  Addictions. Slaves to the drug dealers.  I ride in on my white pony, more a jack ass, a harley davidson actually. I wrestle the man from the dealers. The dealers are actually kind of  glad to give him up now that they've taken his house, his home, his wife, his kids, his job, his dog, his health. There's so little money and will to live that our struggle for this remnant is ritual itself. They're interested in a new loser. They want a celebrity or a banker, maybe a doctor, or a lawyer, a younger heiress. That's who they'd rather devote their time to. So they let this one go.  I good samaritan him back to wholeness and hope he doesn't look back knowing he'll turn to salt if he does.
And I must reassure myself that I should live each day.  Each day I must reaffirm life. Sometimes many times in the day I must do this.  All day long my office is an argument for defeat.  It’s about suicide or addiction or leaving a marriage or a relationship or getting into another abusive marriage or relationship or not working or working in an abusive relationship with a satyrical boss or becoming a terrorist, or slashing.  Losing direction or faith and not knowing where the detour occurred. I come into the abyss and join the darkness to find you thn hope we  find our way back together.  You bitch and complain all the way and when you get into the light and have the strength to stand on your feet you will curse me forever for taking you out of your rabbit hole. There will be enemies of mine who will join you. Those are the ones whose finances I've affected by criticizing their hypocrisy.   I believe I'm  helping rebuild in a world bent on destruction.  I'm  helping lose  the needle back in the hay stack.  I'm suggesting we look for love and work instead.
What is the meaning? What is the reason?  
Death is stalking me.
I’ve been in the shadow of the valley.
I’ve held the dying in my arms. Now I am the dying. We always were. But didn't think of it that way. A daily dance.  A song of songs.  A cruel or kind embrace.
I’ve known the last words.
I’ve been the last face.
I’ve had little reason for doubt in those times.
There is a certainty in reality. I’m among ideologues, talking heads who can’t find their ass with both hands.  I’m unduly judgemental. I know their fear is like fingernails on glass. There’s a whine and screech I hear. I see it in their bodies. Their hypertension and the organ failures speak to the war they’re waging. It’s hard for everyone to go on.  I don't imagine others can know the sheer volume of experience, the screech of emotions as they talk and shout so many things, yet really think they're being 'discrete'.  The ones in uniforms are the loudest. They have the shortest fuses.  They judge themselves as they judge others. Harshly.
Even the rich and privileged come to their ends, face death.  The money men and women lack the equanimity of philosophers or poets.  "You can’t take it with you.", they even say ,unknowingly.   I hear their screams in terror in the anger of their skin. I see the pulsations of troubled arteries. The vessels in their eyes betray them. Their pupils are worth a thousand words.  They lie to themselves.  There is such terror in the death of materialists.  I’m bolstered by my spiritualism. I’m comforted by my faith.  The faithless flounder before life and death.   Lies no longer serve them in that last encounter.
He hung himself.  I knew him well.
I knew him and could not convince him that there was more to life than a needle in his arm.  I failed him as much as I failed the woman when I held her dead baby in my hands.  Oh I know there were others.  It takes a village to raise a child. The baby was dead before I was called to the hospital.  I was only there to witness. I recorded the man's passing as well. Our conversations about the 'culture of addiction' and the need for 'self medication', his 'right to die' and all that other stuff.  Armchair philosophers love to talk. He was a wonderful man.  So young. A mere 50 year old. Old for the dark ages but so young today.  So sad. Such tragedy.  The dealers had long ago stopped giving him money and fast cars. The good time girls had gone.  He was so sick he hardly stole enough for his needs.  He was alone in an SRO when they found him.  Hanging.
So many live their lives in jail or asylums. I don’t know how I could go on with out the wilderness or the sea.  I escape to these empty wild and full reaches where sometimes hardly a bird or an animal interrupts my solitude. The hum of the anthill city is far away. The illusion of the substance of crowds is behind me. I’m hanging on a mast or sitting in a clearing with a rifle watching and waiting.  The solitude washes over me healing like gentian violet.  The sickness leaves for a while.  The suffering is less. God the chimney sweep has taken away a load of soot.
Desire remains.
I miss her scent, her nakedness, the loveliness of her.  I miss the dying between her legs that resurrected and restored my faith as much as any time in the wild.  Before she lost her faith and way.  Before we slid apart.  Sweat is slippery.
He told me of the men on the upturned life raft in the North Atlantic, the freezing numbing cold, others slipping into the dark, then later the sharks.  He remembers the faces of the men..  He didn’t know why held on or why he lived.  Remembrance day is special for him.  He gives thanks and mourns his comrades long lost.  One day he expects to meet with them again.
I don’t know why, he says. I don't know why I never let go.
She thought it was all ‘luck’.  Mine was good. Hers was bad.  She was a victim. I was a victimizer.  I just remember the work.  I don’t like that they deny the work today.  Fatalism.  I prefer ‘karma’ and ‘retribution’.  Yet I really don’t know why I was born to parents who loved me or why I decided to always to work for the benefit of my fellow man while she set out to serve herself and her own and today is lonely.  I explain today it's for the money. That's the reason they understand.  It's only when I explain how to make money they see the reason in my serving. Was it only about the money?  How can they understand that it was little about the money. If you can save a life you can make a million but what's a million to a dying man.  I dream of being alone at sea again crossing oceans facing challenges and adventures, but going where.  It's always here.
I don’t know why I didn’t rest when there was ‘enough’. Like my grandfather and father I worked longer for the times of trouble and saved as they did.  All around me there were parties.  All around me there were ‘easy schemes’ but instead I just got up before dawn and went to work and returned long after dusk.  When I was "taking time off" I was learning other skills.
The government gets votes with redistribution schemes.   Steal from the rich and give to the poor.  More and more I see my counterparts working under the table,  working scams.   The rewards gone out of honest work. The sacrifice and work are no longer  redistributed.  Only the rewards are redistributed. The pay off is in the complaining.   The thugs steal the potatoes of the farmers till all is like Africa where no one ‘saves’ because ‘savings’ are stolen.  Like children.   It’s become that here with the banks and the greed of bankers.  My father told me of the men who hid coins in mattresses because they couldn’t trust the banks of his day.
Only the nouveau rich flaunt their wealth.
I’ve stored my earnings in education and now am aging towards dementia.  All the lessons of survival and success I’ve learned will be fore naught when my mind is lost.  Forget about the banks.  Insaniety erodes all much quicker.
So what is dementia. Not the silly materialist explanation. But Lethe.  What is the forgetting.  The stupid are always happier than the smartest.  There’s blessings in mediocrity that the mediocre cannot know.  Intellectuals are a morbid lot.
God doesn’t want our ideas as much as he loves our dance.
It’s not called the ‘song of creation’ for naught.  The celestial spheres make music.  I may lose my mind but I’ll not lose my inner ear.  I’ll always dream.  To dream that is the rub.
These days my dreams have been happy and adventuresome.  The nightmares still occur but less so.
I did like this coffee.  What a miracle the world of distribution is.  This global product is my miracle. My fridge is sacred. It runs on propane or electricity.  I have this wonder of a gas stove I’ll light again and make another cup. To savour a morning cup of coffee. This is true wealth.  It’s not the myriad of things but rather the ability to enjoy them. To have the presence and peace of mind to languish in the moment and love the celebration of creation. That is the elixir of youth.
What will I do today?  I’ve been reading this brilliant book by a new French Canadian author. I’d surely like to finish it before I see him next.  The dog definitely wants a walk.  There are meetings to go to, church services and gatherings of those who are honouring our soldiers.  It’s Remembrance Day.  I can’t help but remember my father.  I miss him.  We all missed my mom when she went first.  I was such a fool when I was younger.  There was so much I wanted to know.  But he knew I’d learn it soon enough.  There’s somethings one can’t learn with words alone.  Experience has taught me his wisdom.