Blank Slate

Blank slate. Saturday morning.  Wake to the day at 630 am. Didn’t sleep in. Like sleeping in. But somehow the mind and body thought getting up was the thing to do.  Don’t recall any discussion or referendum.  Not even a bladder lead motion.  Just up and at ‘em.

I didn’t make coffee or meditate or do the daily yoga calisthentics, modest as they are. I did shower and shave and dress and then of all things fed the cat and walked the dog.  I picked up his poop. Twice.

Now I’ve read.  Commenting fatuously on facebook.  Thinking myself rather clever. Vanity. Laughing at the comedy.  Now again, the blank slate.  

There’s countless things to do

1. Build a space ship

2. Escape orbit

3. Die and go to heaven and pay for the guide book this time round

4. Clean the place...my latest delaying tactic has been to think I ‘ll hire someone and supervise them while they clean the place and keep me attending to this. I did it just before the repairs and the now seeing the post repair mess I’ve been slow going at fixing things up

5. It’s hunting season. I have my truck back and could go out and have an overnight hunt but next week I’m really going hunting.

6. I could go do those shopping things I never have time for.

7. I’d like to get Gilbert groomed but they need an appointment so it will have to wait another couple of weeks.

8. I have a storage locker to organize and clean - Again I thought I’d hire someone and supervise them. What I really need is someone to supervise me. 

9. I ‘should’ write the Great Canadian Novel.

10 I ‘should’ produce the ‘great work of art’.

11. I ‘should’ exercise more. I thought of going to the pool.

12. I’ve rather enjoyed reading on the couch.  I finished my submarine warfare book last night in bed and have more of Yuval Harran’s Sapiens to have a go at.  I’m reading three books a few pages at a time, Harran’s, Ferguson’s and Jordans.

13. I’m supposed to learn another language.

14. I could address the slow internet problem.

15. I have book keeping to do.

16. I could put on pants.

17. I could go to a meeting or church or the pool or the gym or the library or the reading room or Macdonald’s for an egg McMuffin or Starbucks for a latte. I could phone someone .

18.  It’s this blank slate.  A free day. Not really.  Nothing is pressing.  The hunting is sort of. The season is limited.  

19.  I could télé transport somewhere.  Beam me up.  I’d rather like to have a sex change to slot in a different personality for this one.  A new life of adventure.  Sort of ‘black like me’ but keeping the genitalia. Cross dressing. I’ve rather wanted breasts.  Whenever they’re not around I miss them. So perhaps have my own.  Of course whenever there are breasts about I prefer the whole woman and am rather transfixed by their beauty, creativity, genius, but they frighten me today.  If you can’t beat em join em.
 I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. I was in some very sketchy places, people drinking and doing drugs. I was at the time with girls and other guys. I ‘m thankfully not a ‘black out’ drinker.  But what if I was. I would swear I’ve never hit a woman and never raped a woman.  I’ve never raped a man. Or had sex with children or animals.  I’ve begged women for sex.  I’ve given women most of my income in my life time.  Even in marriage I’ve requested sex and waited and after months of no sex walked away. I don’t think of myself as a ‘fighter’. I preferred even in hockey to play defence. I’ve hospitalized attackers but they were men.  I’ve been attacked by three men at a time and been pretty beat up but let my guard down and on drugs was raped. But I knew the risks and gambled there would be gains. I was disappointed, a lot, The promises didn’t come true.  I didn’t get ‘contracts’.  I want to get everyone I talk to day to sign a contract.  I fear the irrationality and political natures of courts, their preferential treatment to maintain the rich and status quo, their pseudo mercenary war nature, the lack of truth in society and the celebration of slander and false allegations.  No one I know today , all my friends, and certainly my enemies, some of whom I think have sex with animals, wouldn’t ‘pass’ the ‘journalist test of public office’.  Increasingly I look at the Chinese ‘citizen awar’ and it seems the only one who could ‘pass’ would be a psychopath.  Humans need not apply.
 I’ve had women and men crawl naked into my beds on many occasions. That happened on the ‘road trips’ with dance and drama.  It happened with nurses in call rooms.  When I complained I was told I was ‘radiated sexuality’ and my beautiful colleague laughed saying she faced the same and we both wondered if we should ‘act ugly’ or something, I certainly didn’t tell people I was a doctor when I went to clubs. I said I was a teacher and met another teacher who was a priest.   I said no over and over again.  I’ve run out of rooms and slept in locked bathrooms. Even with a wife on cocaine I’ve left to get a hotel to sleep so I could work in the morning. Her work was erratic. Her drug abuse my problems. I couldn’t ‘control’ my wife so I stopped everything to limit the potential deaths.    I was always saying ‘no I’m married’ to women unclothing or rubbing against me.  When I was a divorced doctor it was cleavage city and hands all over my body and strategic brushing up against me.  It was obvious.  The single women doctors laughed and complained about the orderlies.  We were as leaders held to a higher standard. I said no and then dated that professional, the amazing day time nurse, night time brothel worker, stalker.  Scarey lady.  Right out said she wanted to marry a doctor.  Cut the tips off condoms. I left town to get away from her.  I’ve treated so many psychotics and psychopaths and borderlines and sociopaths.  I’m afraid to be around women or children. I don’t like to go outside.  The attacks can come from any direction.  Maybe the clerk wants 20 minutes fame.  I already paid extortion once, and learned ‘that’s just norm in business, the lawyer said, I know she was caught stealing and smoking meth on the job but it’s better to give them money to go away that get dragged through the courts....thousands to a lawyer for advice.....same with the fellow who stole my vehicle.....’if it was worth more, it would be worth the court and all, but you parked it at his place and he sold it and the police won’t prove it and the insurance company won’t accept it lost because you said it was stolen and he’s now chopped it and included it in the insurance claim for his house he burnt down....go after him and he’ll show up on tv holding somebody’s baby and claiming you’re harassing him....take the loss....the price of doing business....my friend laughs when I whine about the law....tells me how he and his friends have to remove a gang and their meth lab from his father’s apartment building because the police wouldn’t get involved.  The guy threatened to kills me and my dog for a whole year and only stops when he threatens to kill Trudeau on his visit and finally he’s silenced.  I felt in good company he’d been threatening to kill a lawyer and his dog all year.  I don’t know why I pay taxes. 

I can go out .  I stay alone and it’s a bit crazy. I liked sailing across straits and such.  The boat on autopilot. A fishing line out. I was doing something. I can’t sit here and put a fishing line out the window and feel I’m doing something.  

20. I ‘should’ be finding a cure for schizophrenia.  It’s the physical doctors job to ‘cure cancer’. I should find a ‘cure’ for addiction. Abstinence and truth are too daunting. The great experiment with everyone smoking dope is about to begin. Seemed like the drinkers smoked and drugs begat drugs rather than lessened them and drugs birds of a feather flock together.  C

21.  It’s a blank slate I derail into past resentments and future fears rather than addressing the perfection of the present, the now won because this is the dimension where God is.  I’m in the presence of God, plaise and thanksgiving, prayer and forgiveness, meditation.  Here Lord I’m yours. Guide me. Take this time and make me a channel of thy peace.

22. I have to get the cat kitty litter.  I need a screw to repair my bow. I need a u-bolt from Canadian Tire. I could vacuum.  I could just get on my motorcycle and see where it takes me. I did that with my bicycle those idyllic summer days when I had nothing but time. Now it’s a priceless commodity and I’m always feeling I’m not holding it sacred like a new born baby but taking it for granted.  Time is life.  

23. I have to leave this screen and keyboard for now and move.  I like the get on the motorcycle idea. Wind therapy.  Thank you God. 

Memory

I laughed when I heard the joke , “if you remember the 60’s and 70’s you weren’t there.” Alice Cooper who made his first four shock rock albums drunk and stoned and his next 20 clean and sober joked recently about reading celebrity autobiographies.”I was there and I know that they’re only vaguely true... the memories of then are more like a dream’
I just enjoyed one of many neurological and psychiatric podcasts I’ve been listening to on ‘constructive memory’ The last neuroscientist said the implications of the research are huge and should revolutionize the legal system. Unfortunately it remains 19th century in a 21st century world. Nothing was more trubling than to listen to the OJ trial handling of DNA evidence appreciating how scientifically outdated the legal system is regarding some aspects of evidence.The same holds true regarding memory and testimony.
There are state and trait factors affecting memory. Mood,  attention, group agreement, social acceptability, medication, drugs , marijuana, time of day and pre conception are all factors involved in memory. The basal ganglia affects attention as the hippocampus affects memory but short term and long term memory are also affected by neocortical and subcritical structures.
The reason I remember Beatles songs is as much to do with them being replayed endlessly through my life.
Retrospective falsification is the phenomena of consciously or unconsciously mis remembering events previously held true. The simplest near ubiquitous example are the post divorce claims “I never loved him. I never loved her.’ despite the obvious hard evidence of wedding children and photos and then the change of heart with anterograde ripples. It’s been said that after WW2 not one German could be found who said they’d supported the Nazi party. Even Peter denied Jesus until the cock crowed.
False Memory Syndrome was a term that arose when biological fathers were serially and routinely accused of infant rape and pedophilia not just for psychopathic reasons but based on the fallacies of emotional memory. Metaphors become reality and marketers like Goebbels knew even a lie repeated loud and long enough becomes the perceived truth. Individual memory is like the collective memory of history. There it is said the winner writes history. In the individual there are similar characters
Competing for the dominant narrative.
It’s all further complicated by research on time, causation and perception. The questions regarding time travel are complicated by the multiplicity of possible pasts. This are all sobering considerations to be considered in this latest mental health epidemic of memory and false memory. All this of course is occurring at a time when an aging population fears forgetting their car keys is a sign of dementia. Time really to study neuroplasticity and how that affects memory and read again the classic ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’

Anti-authoritarianism and God

I’ve woken up again into a complex world of form and colour and sound. I don’t recall making it. I don’t know how to create it myself. I’ve a memory I don’t know how I came by but it remembers things much the same as they were from yesterday.  The dirty dishes are in the sink. I’ve got the same number of hands and feet and such.
I exist. I’m the perceiver here. But I don’t know who or what created this space and stuff and my mind and senses and such.  I don’t seem to be the author of my own existence unless I’m already demented and forgot some special powers I had and don’t seem to have now.  It’s way beyond 3 d printing. It’s a life I’ve got and I don’t really know how that’s come about. There are Ideas I have and hypotheses but none of it is really better than bullocks.
I like Buber who described this experience as I and the Other.  There is a sense of separation.  Me and this computer. Me and this air about me.  I see at least in a dualism of sorts.
Now because I’m humble and don’t have the capacity to create reality out of thought to the best of my knowledge I grant the existence of a creator.  Some “other” that made or is this world I, my limited self, this ego, have woken up to.  I think the aethesist are weak minded and don’t give thought to this basic dilemma of existence.  I’m here waiting for Godot and they’re going on about there not being a God while I’m in awe and gob struck by the table and the chairs and the mundane sacredness of existence. When I stepped outside it was even more awesome.  I have this little dog to and he’s utterly curious about everything like any minute he’s going to find the answer. Now I appreciate that for decades I’ve been looking for the creator and had but glimpses and experiences.  I’ve not actually met some black momma or white dude in a cloud.  I’ve just felt safe and secure and not alone. I have this sense of a positive entity. This other is kind enough to share this creation with me.  That may be projection. That may be a wishful thinking.
My aethesist friend would say that when he wakes his bed has ever been there. The Multiverse dimensional reality forever and to forever may have existed in all it’s complexity as is with my sole preoccupation making sense of it.  But my other friend once a gold loving light hearted person is now heavy hearted and philosophical in a tedious sort of way.  So I do like the humour of the god folk.  They’re less wicked than those who seem like wankers. We meet and congregate and share our faith.  For it is faith.
I’m anti authoritarian with the creator as much as I am with everything and everyone else.  I object that I woke today to my own place with the dirty dishes of last night and wish that this space was a self cleaning entity.  I have a number of complaints like the aches and pains in this body.  My memory suggests that they follow from my over use strains and even abuse of this body but still I wish a creator would grant me a new pain free body.  And I don’t like the aging experience much so I would rather be think and wrinkle free and no longer have grey hair.  I’m anti authority about those things. I have a memory of an unappreciated younger self that ran faster and jumped higher. I’d like that today.  So despite the ignorance I have of this whole of creation I’m critical and even think that I could do better. I may do sit ups today and remedy some of the problem but it’s still much easier to be negative and wait for a magical solution to my minor discomforts.
I haven’t even got around to considering that this other might have a ‘purpose’ for this wonderland I’ve been gifted with.  I don’t even know if I have a purpose. I have yesterdays plans and goals and all the relationships in my memory but this is a new day.
I fantasize that I could pack and grab the dog and head off to a war zone with a sniper rifle and play out the game I watch on tv and play in games. I could buy a romance experience with a slim young erotic person like the literature that is so popular in the culture.  Love and war.  Instead I will have another Kaffkasque day living a Camus existence celebrating life in a mundane sort of office way talking to be people about life and why to not destroy themselves or other while they’re trying to figure things out.  Everyone is quite hysterical.  There’s even these television and computer news files that show strangers having all manner of insanity, talking heads and drams and music and sports.  It’s amazing what people get up to in this prison of life without really knowing anything about the ‘why’.
I’m fascinated with the why and sometimes shout in the night in the woods at God ‘Why’.  I’m anti authoritarian then.  I’m not as filled with acceptance at times when I’m experiencing pain in this body or fear or worry. I remember this is a little ball I’m sitting on and it is spinning around a sun in a galaxy somewhere at the arse end of the universe.  Its not like I’m in the centre of anything but my own mind where I appear I am a legend.
Today I will try to be less anti authoritarian.  I know I’m appalled at the so called ‘political’ leadership and the ‘bankers’ and ‘lawyers’ and ‘eurocrats’ that are enough to make anyone want to escape to reality tv.  It astonishes me in the news that there can be such corruption and greed and waste and narcissism in this democracy.  I feel like it’s a riot or a farce but then I have to ask what really do I think of this existence I’ve just woken up to. The metaphor I use seems so much to define my feelings about it.  It’s entertainment and distraction.
I feel I’ve been here a long time and still don’t know whose life this is.  I know there are abortions going on daily and people being killed and thieves stealing food but right here and now I’m still not knowing really truly whose life this is.  I have hypotheses and  I have faith but today I’m really going to focus on the authority. I don’t think it’s me.  The author of this life could have been me. One theory says that we get together between these reincarnation lives in a place called the bardot and there we write these existences.  I may be meeting with some of the other script writers today and we don’t knows. That’s the Cloud of Unknowing. It really wouldn’t be fun if we knew everything.  So yes I may die to day but death is just an awakening to true life.  That’s my favourite thought. I’m less afraid and angry when I think that.
Now despite being anti-authority and angry that I have so many limitations and inadequacies, I don’t fly, and I’m not the worlds greatest lover, richest, most sensitive, wisest person, but rather mediocre, instead, despite all this I am going to talk to this other in a way I remember is called ‘prayer’.  I’m going to ask that today be special and that I come closer to knowing whoever or whatever is behind my waking today here and now. I also want to do what is best for me today that I may be of most service to whatever the grand scheme is.  I don’t want to be whining and complaining and pushing back but rather I’d like to go forward with a bounce in my step and a smile on my face. I ask God, because I chose to call the other God, that God be with me and guide me and show me the Way.  Thank you God for this awakening today, for the bed and warmth, the little dog, this body, the toilet and the food. Thank you.  Now I’m going to use the shower. I I seem to recall this is one of the greatest creations of all time and always gives me joy as this thing called coffee has given me joy. Thank you.

Moscow- last day

The swimming pool church was closed.  The Pushkin museum was closed.  It’s 9:30 am.  Tourism opens in Moscow 10 to 11 am.  I’d not had a morning coffee yet. Just yoghurt and Russian sparkling water.  I’ve already stood beside an enthusiastic Russian and genuflected three times before the icon outside the church.
Travelling for me is a time for writing. In Gr. 3 or 4, Mrs. Murray or Mrs. Cowrie assigned us the task of writing letters home from places we visited in ‘geography’.  I wrote epistles.  A psychiatrist might intuit a need for ‘attention’.  I was a day dreamer. Someone might say I needed antipsychotic medications then.  The flights of fancy to other planets of the galaxy would be no more.  I’d not astro project or have intuitions that proved true. I’d not heal wounded birds and gather hurt things to me.  I’d have no time for such nonsense.  I’d not sing because when I sang I didn’t sing on key for a very long time. I was good at defending myself and beating up gangs that attacked me or my friends.  If I’d not had a mother that made me a set of pyjamas for my teddy bear I’d have been a better killer. Perhaps taken that sense into the win or lose of business transaction.  Maybe I’d have gone further in athletics not sort of turned away from the group sports to pursue the lone pursuits with only myself as my main competitor.  Maybe I wouldn’t have danced.  I’ve a potpourri of skills that span the gender spectrum and spend too much time with under dogs, odd balls and outliers.  Maybe I could have just chosen friends from the rostrum social status.  Rejecting the ones who weren’t the flavour of the month.
I would have liked to ‘fit’. I envy those who have these neat collections of traits and behaviours that fit an acceptable mould. Those dancers who don’t ride motorcycles and hunt big game.  When I was a vegetarian and meditating cross legged all day, yoga was anathema to the main stream. Now I’m in churches genuflecting and praying to Jesus when Buddha is all the rage. I fancied Buddha in my 30’s. He’s still a pretty nice guy, like the Queen.  I still like Yogananda and for some reason reflected on meeting Bishop Tootoo recently, thinking that he like the Daliai Lama I’d also met, were very fine fellows.  But mostly I liked the doctor who shared a call room with me when the building flooded and   slept through the alarms only waking when his personal beeper went off.
I think of storms at sea and being knocked down in sailboats  going on through the eye of the storm.  I’ll never forget the pattern of the sea and eerie glow. There are some places I’ve been that no amount of money could buy. Only experience gets you in and out. Like the charging moose bent on killing me.  The rifle didn’t fail me that day despite the 30:06 bullets bouncing off the lowered horns.  He died feet from where I kneeled.
For some reason I’ve been remembering different patients , ones I’d not thought of for years.  With the Ukranian and Russian troubles I remembered the old Ukranian man whose life I saved by sacrificing the doctor bent on killing him through ignorance and arrogance.  Now I’m so honoured to know a Russian professor whose sense of style and flare is so original. I see where she gained this here in the streets of Moscow where fashion outshines Paris.  But how can these women walk all day in 4 inch heels on cobblestone?
I explained to another just the other day that the doctor we knew wasn’t dementing.  She’d said he was forgetting things and missing words.  I explained that dementia was only when you didn’t know the meaning of an automobile or tried to mop the floor with the dog.  Then she said ‘some kind of cognitive failure’ like the young will , with the naming of things, having meaning beyond the thing itself.  Then eventually we talk of talk of talk and seem so learned to ourselves when the garden is just a garden.
I am overwhelmed at times now with memories so vivid I’m living in the past again as if it were today. The woman who passed me in the Russian subway reminded me so strongly of the patient I knew who refused to leave 1969.  She was dressed as this modern woman was.  Transport her here from her room in the asylum and she’d be in vogue.
Young people in their 20’s dress like we did then.  I remember your body so sensuous and agile in the wheat field where we made love all day.  I thought our bodies were forever wedded.  I never lost love for your every movement. There was such grace in the way your eyelashes lifted as you looked through me and at me.  Your lips were so full. I was blessed in your love.  That was then and now they dress like we did.  The girl I just passéd wore her hair as you did, the same folksy beret.
If someone asked me the time at that moment I wouldn’t know what decade I was in.  I’ve a bliss of memories that bring tears to my eyes, I’m so blessed with who I’ve know. This journey and adventure has been such a wild and crazy passing. I didn’t know I was on a roller coaster even when I was taking a train,  bicycling or hitch hiking across the country with a beat up guitar.  I've  had a beard, a mustache, long hair, short hair. Looking back it's such a tapestry.
All I wanted was to know you God, in all your manifestation. I loved the Song of Songs best.    My fingertips tingled as lightning leapt through my body caressing the buttocks of the woman who knew me as her lover. It was a very big bed on the wintry night in a city where people only spoke French. I saw a horse drawn carriage and remembered our carriage ride that night, the fur robe lain over our legs.
I’m here. I’m in this present. I’m writing home from geography class. I’m walking around in a world where the language is as psychotic as the letters on the signs. I’m stopping at toilets,  churches and occasionally a museum. Museums indulge in the collective memory.  Some are obviously dementing. There’s coffee spots too.
Right now I’m looking for a meeting.  I spoke English with a Russian last night.  He was drinking and smoking cigarettes.  I was weary of the memory of the substances.  I just want to be awake. I want to be present.
Here I am in Moscow but already I’m thinking of my dog. I’ve dreamed of him these last three nights. I’ve remembered my office, my vehicles, my homes, faces of friends and thought again how an intense vacation can restore the joy of the mundane. Just as the tedium threatened to swallow me whole, I am relieved by this whirlpool of unknown, so much so that I long again for the everyday everyday.  And of course I need a vacation from my vacation.
I’ll never forget when Baiba and I, after bicycling Europe got off, the ferry in England and simply rejoiced in the known language.  That first English woman we talked to must have thought us batty as we hung on her every syllable.  We take understanding for granted. We take communication for granted.
The coffee is done. I’m refreshed.  Time to go look at this church that was closed when last I came this way.  Perhaps now I’m synchronized with tourist time.