Molar Root Abscess and the Toxic Workplace

It’s not easy to admit to being a whimp.  I had an appointment to have a crown put on by Dr. Douglas Lovely, my amazing dentist New Westminster.  I admit I’ve loved going to him for 20 years because he’s literally painless. As a child our dentist didn’t believe children felt pain. It left as lasting aversion to dentists.  Doug’s work is the best.  It helps he’s a sailor and that all my doctor friends see him too.

The day before the crown my face flared up. A horrible night of sleeplessness and pain.  I was so glad to have the appointment.  My face was slowed and Doug did the xray showing the tooth was cracked and a “pea size“ abscess at the base of the second root.  The crown wasn’t anything but it was on a cracked tooth as well.  My gnashing my teeth in my sleep at night was catching up on me.  Doug gave me antibiotics and recommended high dose ibuprofen.  He had to bring the swelling down to extract the tooth.  Extraction was set for a week later.  

Tha night was awful. I don‘t do sleepless nights well anymore. Too many years of call.  First surgery and deliveries and later suicidal calls and drunken calls.  It’s been years though that I’ve had to go to a hospital. Still it’s hard to get back to sleep.  And a tooth ache didn’t help.  Doug warned me it might get worse before it would get better.  But I’m a whimp.  My face swelled out like a chipmunk with nuts.

I had to take the afternoon off work because I was just simply too fatigue. Fortunately the last morning of work was slow.  Doug had contacted me when I sent a picture of my lopsided face and expressed my abject misery. ‘It’s almost as bad as a man flu’ summed it out.  A lot of cowering and shaking by men all round.  Drum roll in the back ground. Images of the grim reaper. Women thoroughly insensitive.  ‘Tooth ache. ‘. ‘Man flu’.  Really? 

No one God has them deliver babies. I’d never do it.  I also concluded yet again I’d never make a spy. The first mention of torture and I’d give up anything to stop the pain. I was beyond Motrin and Alleve and ASA. I was on a cocktail of all three at three times the recommended dose.  I was a toxic waste dump of NSAD’s.  I understand and always have why people who aren’t treated sufficintly for pain by doctors turn to the street vigilantes services for pain defence.  Pain is thoroughly underestimated by bureaucrats and anyone who has not known it’s bite.  

I couldn’t bite either. Soft foods and soups and embarrassing drool out the side of my face.

Bleak.  Suicidal. Rethinking euthanasia.  Paranoid moments. Wondering who might have caused the toothache. Was it the Russians. Was it radioactive.Did Trudeau do this. All else evil in Canada today can be placed at his stupid feet. Why not my tooth ache.  3 and 4 am arre ripe times for vivid imagination.  Was the chip some government lab had placed in my tooth finally needing a battery change. I’ve heard all the best ideas from schizophrenic patients. Even Freud concluded they might be right.  Doug would tell me if I had a chip in my tooth and the battery needed replacement. He said he’d take it out and then do an implant.   I don’t have dental care.  Only illegal immigrants get that in Canada.  Who cares what the cost is when your eyes are bulging out. I even thought of going to the hospital emergency for morphine but remembered this was Canada and I’d wait for 10 or 20 hours in the waitroom for a shot of morphine exposed to all the latest virus bacteria and the hell of Canadian ER’s.   Light would come soon.

Doug was in Whistler but called my pharmacist who gave me Dexamethasone and Flagyl to add to the Clindamycin.  Dougs voice is reassuring.  He calls after all his work.  He still cares. Doctors are punished today for caring.  The administration is swaggering and arrogant, the worst in the civilized world, 20 times what is needed, doctors hated by government here, the fewest in the civilized world, longest wait lists.  







 I watch a video of the Ontario doctors speaking out against the Liberal government there. I think of all the patients who are so desperate and angry and how little we have to give them anymore now that all our health care resources are devoted to government administration and doctors are condemned for unprofessionalism because they won’t kill themselves fast enough. The paper work and the endless rules and committee ivory tower bullshit destroying us as the patients cry and come in angrier and more and more in despair. Everyone has gone without to pay the outrageous taxes and all the money goes to debt and administration. It’s so depressing on the frontlines.

I’m thankful that dentists are still free of the scourge of Space Station administration arrogant in their ignorance of the death they cause from distance and negligence.  

I’m unhappy.  A Christian biker died.  He was a friend as much as anything.  He loved his gal. He loved Jesus.  I’ve not adjusted to the dying these last couple of years.  Family, friends and the epidemic of fentanyl. It was bad enough working front lines through the AIDS epidemic. This is worse.

The government blamed the doctors for the opiate crisis.  I read last week they were totally off. Their calculations all wrong. Their false accusations like all the other fake news right out there.  It turns out that the fentanyl is just another Chinese attack and part of the drug wars. ‘Whatever minor factor ‘overprescribing’ is ,is the least concern. But there goes our government demonizing doctors and our dying patients .  They’re in the business of marijuana and euthanasia now.  

My pain had dropped with the sleep and hope the added anti biotic brought.  I had homework to do.  I just lay in bed.  I had all this stuff that was to be done but another weekend devoted to getting ready to go back to the wars.  Any female patient can lie and falsely accuse a male doctor if he doesn’t agree with breaking the law and lying for her and a committee will destroy the doctor because that’s their agenda.  It’s not paranoia. They do the same to female doctors.  All the doctors realize now that any patient , especially the psychopaths,  have the power of complaints, any of which cause the doctor to lose $10,000 with no cost to the patient.  There’s a totally skewed power dynamic and it’s all a lie.  There’s no cost in Canada for perjury.   

Indeed multiculturalism denies the value of truth or knowledge.  It’s no longer about anything but feelings and power and men are all wrong and white men are all racists.  Every doctor I know, male and female, in the front lines tries to do the least now. No one wants to take on an unknown patient.  We’re working like our administration which is collectively destroying the practice of medicine. I’m entering an age when I may need medical care. I’m afraid of hospitals because the workplace is utterly toxic because of the administration and the anti doctor government. The nurses are being reduced too so we can have more politically correct administration.

I don’t have the reserve for a tooth ache.  I don’t have the reserve for sleepless nights.  My friends are all struggling with normal life and the workplace is killing them. The demands on doctors have skyrocketted while the fat cat administration is swaggering with self praise, making the rules for their dream jobs and constant vacations and giving themselves raises upon raises but never visiting the front lines. It’s WWI all over again and we’re the machine gun fodder.

The patients get less. We’re all condemned by a cruel and perfect government judgmental to the core Everyone is ‘offended’ all the time and the standards of perfections and political correctness are beyond the pale. You can kill with negligence but don’t dare swear or raise your voice or object to lacks of beds or deadly wait lists.  And then you hear they’re going to give more ‘free health care’ to immigrant families as more doctors suicide under the strain and in response to the cruelty and insensitivity of the administration.

Another night of sleep. More ibuprofen, more antibiotics.  The swelling’sdown. I can eat. I think of my colleagues working after having babies and having surgery.  I know so many stoics. I admire so many I know facing the deluge of demands one on one face to face in the front lines and those far from the front are shooting them in the back and fearing that they might ever have to go back out there .  They ‘ve played it smart, got the cushion jobs, moved to the back, played politics, not kept up with medicine, medicine just a stepping stone to power and control.  They never really cared for patients. They’ve seen so few and risen so fast. 

I’m feeling better. I get to church.  I’m humbled by Jesus.  Laura and I watched Monty Python reruns. Laughter therapy.  Communion was good.  The god kids were like herding cats.No one can afford to live in Vancouver.  The criminals and government have turned the city into an unliveable place except for jet setters.  I’m just the ‘Help’’.  Laura laughed to read the book about the ‘help’ and what the help said about the masters.  The destruction of the middle class is taking place. Only the elite are well here. The Mayor actually said something like it being reasonable to pay $3500 rent a month while a miserable shack costs a million anywhere.  The television constantly shows pictures of the rest of the world and the refugees are so happy as scab labour but given the benefits don’t seem to want to work.    

Those of us native Canadians who worked all our lives are leaving major gaps in services as we retire and no one is foolish enough to work in Canada. The whole work ethic is a farce when you see the leadership off on vacation and never working seriously before getting the best leadership job on who his name is.  Work doesn’t pay is the Canadian idea. Entitlement and social justic warriors and activists are all the rage. No one wants to do physics and chemistry or cut lumber or take risky jobs with axes and such.  It’s a talk world.

I type more today than I did as a secretary.  But I get paid for all that I know of biochemistry and psychopharmacology and diagnostics though naming things is quickly going out of fashion. Everything is fashion

I am comforted by the words of the priest. I’m thankful for the sweet sounds of Barry’s music.  I am thankful for all the friendliness of the people we meet here. Downstairs having coffee in the church I remember my mother and father. Dad helped put a new roof on the old church.  Mom always helped make meals and coffee.  We all did the dishes.  The coffee is fine. I’m thankful I don’t drool out of the side of my mouth.  I’m looking forward to camping.  

After everyone is gone. I walk Gilbert along the river and watch a green headed mallard land on the stream.  The  trees are all budding. There a bunting today.  A robin is in a bush with fresh green buds.  Lots of tulips and daffodils. I must focus on the good things. I’ve been depressed with sleepleness and death and a toothache.  I’m a whimp.  I think I once was more.  I sailed solo across an ocean. Faced charging bear.  White water canoed. Walked frozen across tundra after our skidoo went through the ice.  I saved a few children. A woman thanked me for saving her eye.  A few people told me that I convinced them not to kill themselves.  Thousands are sober. Thousands didn’t kill themselves on my watch.  I’ve done a bit of good in my time but it’s all unfashionable today.

I talked to my female colleague and she’s being punished like me for working with the people Jesus used to hang with.  We’re silly not to have been the doctors for the wealthiest. I turned down the job and so did she. We’re working with the really sick, the end of the road, and the feral.  It’s a single party insurance scheme and we’re not supposed to keep these people alive. More and more we’re co opted by insurance companies to write reports to courts and to keep people out of their toxic workplaces and to give them a chance at the legal lottery.  ICBC , our auto insurance plan thanks to government mismanagement is on the brink of bankruptcy. Wherever government gets involved there is horrendous waste and mismanagement in Canada. Rapidly a third world country. Not the meritocracy it once was.  But you know you’re getting old when you talk about the good old days.

I’m insignificantly significant and significantly insignificant.  75% of my colleagues wouldn’t recommend medicine in Canada.  It’s still a beautiful spring.  Today’s sunshine was miraculous.  My face no longer hurts.  I laughed to watch Monty Python’s absurdity, « Always look on the Bright Side of life.’  

It really is funny.  You must stop taking yourself seriously.  It was just a tooth ache. Not nearly as bad as a man flu.

Fear of Economic Insecurity Will Leave Us

Nothing like the rising cost of housing in Vancouver does more to raise the fear of economic insecurity. Highly skilled accomplished friends describe leaving this city because of the criminal wealth from drug trafficking, ‘sharp business practices’, bribes, extortion, off shore criminal money, elite government employees, private armies and private police, political correctness and drug addiction and alcoholism and fear of theft.  Vancouver must rank as one of the greatest cities of theft.  Meanwhile the insurance companies post massive profits and the police merely ‘record’ crime.
I wake in the night worrying and must ask myself a series of important questions
1. Whose in charge?  My very perception of reality is an after thought. It takes nano and mini seconds to process events. I could die and only learn of it as a past event, my consciousness lingering as my body and brain snuffed out.  The idea that God is the prime mover is fundamental from simple reflection. I can’t levitate this house yet a person’s world can be upturned in a second by all manner of natural catastrophes.  My God is a loving God.  My God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotential, I say OM in meditation, the letters to some simply standing for “One Mind”, while to others they reflect the primal sound of the universe, the sound that goes to making up our meaning of ‘home’ and ‘mom’.  When I pray I connect with the universe which is on my side because if it were not I’d be wracked with tortuous pain and subjected to all the fears I associate with hell.  This life seems like hell to me but mostly because of my mind and my interpretation and the clinging I do, the desperation.
2. In this moment I am well.  Fear is about the future.  In Biblical times the wealthiest leaders of society at most could protect themselves from seven years of drought by stockpiling grain.  Prior to only 5000 years ago when civilization followed the hoarding of food stuff, hunter gatherers lived seasonally, year to year, hopeful that they would make it through the winter.  Winter is coming on now. This is the beginning of fall. These are the dark days.  These are the days of coughs and pneumonias. These are the days and nights of rheumatism and arthritic pain. These are the days and nights of festering wounds.  This was the winter of rest but now the government increases taxation and attacks throughout the year but mostly in winter with tax collection at the end when stocks are lowest and psychologically one is at an all time low.  These are the seasons of relapses and suicides. These are the days of long nights on call and countless patients crying and begging to be seen desperate and afraid. These are the days of the utter callousness and arrogance of psychopaths and the spawn of nazis masquerading as anything but. These are the days that victimizers claim that they were victimized first. These are the dark days. Halloween is coming. The witching season. The evil nights of wailing and chafing.
But this is also the coming of the Lord.  This is the beginning of the seasons of Advent. This is the time before Christmas when one begins to think of the Cosmic Christ. When all the negativity of the world, the baby soul hoarding, fear based wealth and materialist aetheists, the bullies and the cry babies, the false accusers, the rapists and the pedophiles, when all of that is faced with the coming of the light.  God came into creation and blew the socks off reality with the Word, with his Son Jesus, with the change of Nietzian Superman reality to the Mother and Child.  This is the baby Christ time. This is the promise of life and protection. This is the time of  the coming of Christ.  This is promise.  This is the Good News.
But right now all is well. I have shelter, warmth, running water, food and friends and family.  In the NOW I am rarely afraid. In the NOW I don’t carry resentments from the past or enter worries from the future. In the NOW I practice the presence of God. God is Love. God is forever opening doors when a window closes. God is with me. God has always been with me. Through all the worst times of my life when I didn’t think I could carry on, when I thought it couldn’t get worse and it did, when I thought I couldn’t carry on, God was with me, holding me, carrying me. I love the poem about the two sets of foot prints in the sand. My God loves me as a child, a youth, a man, a woman, a human, a young person, an old person, a poor person, wealthy person. My God loves me as my father and mother and brother loved me even when I was wrong. My God loves me in jail, whorehouses, asylums, parliament, penthouses, biker club houses, in slums and in wealthy homes in exclusive neighbourhoods.  For I have known fear when I have been wealthy and known those that are wealthy to know more fear than some that are poor.  Indeed it is common for the wealthy to be dependent on their wealth for their own sense of safety and suffer as their bank accounts rise and fall.  They know that their friends are only there for their wealth sometimes and all their lives revolve around their economic position.  I have been afraid poor and wealthy.  The idea that it would change is quite insane.  There is never enough wealth because the wealthiest are most afraid of the theives and the betrayals. Et Tu Brute.  Diogenes was the character who the emperor of all time Alexander asked what he could give him and Diogenes asked that he step aside as he stood in the sun.  Important people are always blocking the light standing up and blocking the view and insisting they are doing nothing but there they are casting shadows and not seeing the darkness they create.   We are forever in the shadows of men and women such as Alexander. We develop patience waiting for them to step aside and stop blocking the sun.  We all know there are infinite resources and that if there were less pomp and pomposity all would be rich beyond their wildest dreams but scarcity is built into this Communist System we live in.   The Communists need ‘control’ and would do anything to put themselves and their religion as God.  Today we fight the Aetheist Communists and the Jihadist Wahabi Muslims.   The God of Love will heal all.  The Son of God will fulfill his sacrifice.  All shall be well. All shall be well. All Shall be well.  As the Hindus and Buddhists teach, this too will pass. The Sufis know this in their turning and rotations.   I live only three score years and some and there are billions on the planet and billions have gone before over 80,000 years or more in historical awareness, but there is but one day and one life that I personally know. I am insignificantly significant and significantly insignificant.  The wisdom of the Desert Fathers, Sufi, Vedas, Q Teachings, Prophets, all have similarities. Put not your faith in the outer world.  Dr. Jung called the unconscious the ‘collective unconscious’.  The experience of ego, my thoughts and fears, are the tip of an iceberg.  The mystics call it ‘the cloud of unknowing.’  The alpha and omega.
3. My fear is what limits my economics. If I had faith the size of a mustard seed’ “I could move mountains’,  I would be open to winning a lottery, I’d be open to gifts unlimited from God. Even now I lack the gratitude to appreciate all that I am given but reach far into the future to worry about deadly diseases and calamities. The gifts come with every day and I’m hardly enjoying playing with one when I’m onto another, each new toy only serving a while to dispel that emptiness. Looking for love in all the wrong places. As CS Lewis said, Talking to the wall instead of the Architect.  I’m looking to false gods rather than the real God.  I’m as bad as the CBC news that is such a propaganda machine that it dare not find anything wrong with the corruption in government here that it instead tells us daily and nightly of horrors around the world. When I’m happy I begin to find fears in the future or the past or imagine Steven King scenarios, catastrophic ing and making up all manner of possibilities, hypochondriasis, distrust, paranoia, imaginary fears, phobias.  We hear of tropical hurricanes for weeks on CBC yet no one in Canada lives in the tropics.  I can’t imagine Jamaican radio broadcasting every time Canada has a snow storm yet the old die here in winter and babies die here as well.  It’s all quite absurd. It’s theatre of the absurd.
4. So when I read something like a promise that ‘fear of economic security will leave us’, it’s not just that my fear will go because I know the fear is mostly of change and that I am most fearless in faith and letting go and trusting the flow and trusting that God does open a door when he closes a window. When I move from one place to another in life I must lighten up. The great book, Drop the Rock, described the inability to move forward weighted down with the past yet so much of our identity is caught up in possessions.  Fear is a lack of love. Anxiety has been described as our distance from God.  Alone I’m a single computer, connected into the network I’m countless Kray. Alone I’m right to be afraid because there are  gangs of bankers and gangs of lawyers and gangs of politicians and gangs of journalists, gangs of communists and gangs of nazis and gangs of jihadists and gangs of beurocrats and gangs of Hell’s Angels, and gangs of police and gangs of Tong, and gangs of military units. I’m an individual and am born in shit and piss. My mother is dead and my father is gone and I fear the absence of family.  I am strongest in the company of the godly. We are not alone.  The evil  drug addict prime minister who clings to his wealth and priviledge takes even my country from me and says that Canada is no longer a nation, he destroys our boundaries and gives away our land and our reputation and our future. He plays the emperor with his empress wife Sophie, our sad imitation of Marie Antoinette.  Canadian feminists are the Eva Brawn’s of this world. Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. I have no family and now because of the evil doings of Justin Trudeau I have no country. And I feel a scoundrel at times .I feel I did not love enough . I feel I did not work hard enough. I feel I should have studied more. I feel I’ve not lived up to my potential. I feel I’ve been beaten over and over again by thugs and beurocrats, police and thieves, and prime ministers and women, and ex wives and their mother in laws, and tax men, ever the tax men, tax men ,tax men and land lords and businessmen and communists and regulators and lawyers and regulations and regulations and political correctness and trust funds and political correctness and gangs and individuals and women with gangs behind them and light weights with gangs and cheats and theives and countless scammers and bankers and dishonest businessmen and killers and haters and drug addicted and insane angry activists and angry women, always angry bullying violent women claiming they’re victims,the Eva Brawns of the world psychotic and psychopathic, ‘the long necked women and their boys’. In my self pity I’m a Travelling Wilbury’s song.  I’m a scoundrel and I have no refuge.  But so said my Lord. The foxes had homes but the son of God has none. My kingdom is in heaven. My kingdom is not here with baubles and things.  So yes my fear will evaporate when I have the right thinking that Kierkegaard had. “Life is suffering until death’. He said.  An Expectation is a preformed resentment. Buddha said that ‘desire if suffering’.  I can remove my fear by right thinking, by enlightenment, letting go and meditation. I can forgive not for the sake of Justin and Sophie Trudeau or any insane enemy I want to create in my crazy mind, but for my sake. Love thy enemy.  I forgive to free myself.  Resentments and fears are renting rooms in my head for free to the boogie men and women of my worst dreams.
5 Fear of Economic Insecurity will Leave Us also means that God’s grace will save us.  “Give us this day our daily bread’.  The story of Manna from Heaven was that God gave it to the Israelites as they needed it. I don’t get what I want as much as what I need. Doing God’s will, following in the steps of righteousness I will be cared for. Collectively the world is progressing will people living longer and more people on the planet than ever before and more people today have more than what only kings and queens had a mere decades before. Billions not thousands live with greater security than ever before. Malthus has been all but proven wrong.  Yes, the CBC fat cat journalists in the wealth and privilege of Toronto and Montreal will beat us all to death with a  poor reserve and not mention the outrageous wealth of the Mohawk and Albertan Aboriginal. The Fake News of Mainstream Media will always sell to emotions and give information without context to sell a bizarre slice of fear based reality.  We will read a Hollywood promotion magazine with a beautiful hair brushed Kardashian’s and never be told of her Sexually Transmitted Disease status or her toe fungus.  Mida Cyress has body odour. No it’s all advertising and fantasy.  It’s a media lie.  An Anderson deceit.  One day we wake from the stupor of youth and realize as George Carlin loved to teach, how we’d been played. With divide and conquer and lies.  Despite all this we are progressing as a collection of individuals in nations and federations and we will continue to move forward despite the stupidity and corruption of our leaders or because they are serving God and God is really in charge.
6. But what if I have broken all the commandments. What if I have character defects of lust, and gluttony, and envy and anger. What if I have all these ‘defects of character’ and I don’t seem to be able to let go of them.  Then I must ‘pray for willingness’ and know that yesterday I was wealthy , we all had innocence at some time in childhood or as babies and may have forgotten but we did, and I had all those defects of character later and still. And my favourite hymn was made by a slave dealing degenerate who like all of us must have had a spiritual awakening and realized he’d gone the wrong way, was going backwards rather than forwards, like “live”spelt backwards is “evil”,  And it took a while going in the right direction to get on because the backwards detour had gone on for a long time.  I am the prodigal son.  I have lived in the mental and emotional and physical pig sties and eaten the food of pigs when I could have come home to my father who would kill the fatted calf in celebration of having me home. The Hymm I so love is Amazing Grace.  Amazing Grace how sweet thou art that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found. Was blind but now I see.”
7. This society is one of hoarding and gambling.  The closer I am to God the safer I am.  Grace is the love of God which I receive by openness.  I don’t receive what I deserve. It is not the works I do because these follow my love of God. I imitate Christ. And yes I physically fight and throw the evil from the temples as well as hang with the little children and meet with the military and even eat with tax collectors and prostitutes and all the sexually different, the rich and the poor. My service and my duty to God are what count. The courts are only an after thought. They have no inherent truth. They’re the Monday Morning quarterbacks. Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.
8. Thank you Lord for the sun I see lighting the skies over the trees. Thank you for this day. Thank you for a good nights sleep in safety, my friend Laura, my dog Gilbert, and the cat George. Thank you we are all together safe and well this morning. Thank you for our work and recreation and the opportunity for service. Thank you for Jesus. Thank you for Christ. Thank you for saints of all religions. Thank you for creation. Thank you for the changelessness and permanence of your love in the changing impermanent world.  Thank you for this body and this mind and this existence. Help me ever to focus on you and find you in the hide and seek of existence. Help me face the Hollow Men and struggle through tthe Kafka Castle and the Camus Trial. Help me serve you and protect us from the communists and aetheists who know not what they do as they have temper tantrum and drama queen fits and steal and insist that they who are so so out of control want to be in control without any experience or training except their insane fear driven desire for power.    Quiet the hysteria of these political nut bars.  Help me to trust in Thee.  There is One God , One Mind. I am a co imaginer in Thy Imagination. Thy will be done, my Lord. Thy will not my will.  Help me to remember that you always want what is best for me and that you have brought me this far and will carry me home.  I am yours.  Help me to love more.
Thank you Lord.

Selective Negative Attention

All of our studies of memory and attention and cognitive behavioural therapy have taught me that I cannot trust my mind to give me a 'true' representative of even my little piece of the world. This 'information' that I experience is constantly being processed and edited by past prejudice and by emotional tone.
For example yesterday, I was driving to work, two seriously whacked out drivers nearly hit my car, one changing lanes without signalling and the other jumping a light in front of me at high speed but causing me to break with concern. Now there were hundreds of other cars on the road. All the other drivers were such model citizens and so thoroughly toilet trained as to drive with the group and be responsible motorists in all ways. In the 20 minute drive two yahoos stick out. I was unable to park because thieves working the parking meters with string and magnets had jammed the meters. It's a recurrent problem. I wanted to report it to the police. Instead of a brief encounter the police wanted me to describe the fellow in detail who had been casing these parking meters even though it might be a long shot that he was the one who was working this city block.
At work I saw some 40 people. The staff were amazing, truly amazing, wonderful competent, reliable delightful people. My colleagues were superb, pleasant, efficient reliable, knowledgeable, informed, courteous. The staff and colleagues and I chatted and exchanged New Years good wishes. The people I saw were all thoroughly pleasant and hard working trying each in their way to be compliant with treatment, making small progress here and there and greater progress in some cases. One person was typically obnoxious and belittling to me and staff and disrupting, loud and ultimately offensive. I asked them to leave. Even the person who had vpmitted in my office was upstaged by the loud person. The man who vomitted had said "I'm going to be sick, looked about, found the wastebasket, vomitted there, and then emptied the bag himself' saying he'd eaten something he thought off from his fridge just before coming, drunk a coke and now felt better with it gone, apologizing profusely for vomitting. Now there was a true gentleman considerate of others even in his distress and really a true contrast to the 'king baby' of addiction the attention seeking drama queen I'd seen earlier who plays the 'big shot' all the time and disdains others psychopathically looking for weak individuals to exploit.
At the end of the day I had a headache not from the thoroughly pleasant and enjoyable people I had to work with, My plan had been to drive to work. 2 yahoos threatened my vehicle en route. After that I was disrupted in my attempt to park by a criminal scheme. Then in the workplace while I had a man be sick in my office the Febreeze helped, there weren't windows as in my other office and by the end of the day the 'stuffiness' and sheer volume of work plus the always routinely offensive person ordering me to hurry up and stop wasting his time, had me exhausted at the end of the day wondering why I do this work and wishing to escape to work in the country or back on a polynesian island.
I was focussing on the frustration of city experience, the encounter with what I euphemistically call 'assholes' all the while my little dog simple loves assholes and sniffs any he can demonstrating that one's negative is another's positive. Or in this case, that I can choose to focus on the highs of my days or the lows and too often and too routinely I'm paying most of my attention to the negatives. In contrast I would like to remember the smiles of the staff. They are truly beautiful people with the greatest greeting manners, incredible love and tolerance for their fellow man, do a myriad of tasks all the while people like the most difficult person that day, "grind" and "grind" at them demanding preferential treatment and wanting to jump the queue and complaining and criticizing them endlessly all the while they're cordial and pleasant in return.
We all tolerate the greatest degree of abuse their daily with belligerence threats, swearing constantly, shouting and squabbling with everyone accepting that this is sickness and the emotional immaturity and social devolution that goes with the disease and the self centredness of people who often have been in jail, some live on the streets where the very traits that are so offensive in community and in waiting rooms actually may have some survival value. The staff and my colleagues smile. They are humorous. Someone had brought an arrangement. Everyone working there was dressed well and were clean. Some of the people I saw had clearly made an effort with their clothing and hygiene to appear as well as possible for the visit. In a way our mind doesn't register the masses of good people.
It's like the media that never reports 25 million Canadians today did not kill their neighbours. Thousands of schools did not have a mass murderer invade their doors today. No tsunami struck anywhere today and no hurricane hit a continental mass yesterday. There was no major new war offensive reported in BBC, just the smouldering old make work kind of wars that reflect the bad marriages of socially inept countries around the world. No one said Canada fed all it's people and provided shelter from the horrible weather conditions of winter for refugees and indigents alike. Elsewhere people are having trouble getting water and food but here at home we did that and kept the trains and planes flying and while more and more people are expecting more and more people to take care of them, frankly because of increasing entitlement and self centeredness, the vast majority of people in the country went to work and paid taxes and worked together with other to make this 2nd day of the year rather spectacular.
If I had the means to see 'truly' without the horrible filters I have I'd be setting off fire works at the end of the day. It realy was a historically great day though here in Vancouver but it's probably not going to show up in history text books. I also forgot that all the people I saw were pretty much dead men and women walking. Their conditions by all rights should have killed them years ago but despite the horrendous burden of disease they keep struggling to live in lives that are so chaotic and messed up that one really should celebrate any day they survive the level of abuse they experience through their own hands and the consequences of their society. I was given the miracle of this day. I was able to be a part of one of the greatest days the universe will ever give someone. I had food and shelter and friends and work and love and everything was truly sacred and amazing. Yet somehow rather than praising God and being eternally thankful that I was participating in the sheer wonder of creation I was focussing my attention on the negatives.
I can't trust my mind. Only my soul is truthful. My emotions are too often reflective of what I think and what I think is too often hijacked by any number of distractions. At the end of the day I need to remember the light. I slept through the night and today there is a new dawn. I sure hope I can see more clearly today. I must somehow ignore the misinformation of my mind and concentrate on the truth and wonder that God gives me. My soul knows better than my mind or sentiment. My soul is the very heart of the matter where wisdom resides and I can appreciate what is true. Please God let me see more truly today and know that truth even in the midst of the moment to moment reality of existence.

Miracles

I believe in miracles.  I believe that events in history have occurred which were apparently 'supernatural' which we now know by the study of science to be 'merely' 'extraordinary'.  In this understanding the 'eclipse of the sun' by the moon is explained today by science as the moon crossing before the sun whereas in the past it was understood as the sun being taken away and returned.  I also believe that man's ego is such that he tends to project his present into the past and believe that the events of yesteryear were as he understands them today. I consider this 'retrospective falsification'.
Understanding this I still believe in Miracles as in 'God events'.
I have a theory about the events of the "Big Bang" but I don't 'know' the Big Bang as I know my own fingers.  However as a scientist today I know the limitation of my own 'belief' in my knowledge of my fingers.  I know the quantum physics explanation of the existence of my fingers and the vast limits of my understanding and perception of even my own fingers let alone matters of distant past. Neuropsychiatry has at once humbled and expanded my understanding of perception.
I believe that there are supernatural forces that we today do not understand so would call their 'effect' miraculous. I believe in a whole list of such forces as telepathy and levitation.  I believe that as all is now and the external material world is a bubble on the vast ocean of the spiritual world which itself is a mystery at the surface regarding the centre and depth I can know only in a limitted sense because that is the nature of this incarnation and the nature of this 'world'.
As theology teaches 'many houses' science teaches many 'dimensions'. There are multiple parallel universes. My perception may 'switch' from one universe to another.  Would I know this.  Subjectively I have a sense of points in history where I came to 'cross roads' of 'potential' and perhaps experienced the 'road less travelled" . I have a sense of these 'nodal' points in time when a confluence of events gives rise to a course which leads me in a certain direction but which might well lead alternatives of self, a multiplicity of perception, in another direction. I am left with what I wake to each day.  I can not in good faith knowing what I do of the potential of this world or of God that more is not possible.  I, for all I know, am the 'rate limitting' step.  I believe an infinitude of events is happening in God's time and God's 'spiritual' domain but that I 'see but through a glass darkly' in my life.  If it was God's will for me to fly in this world I'd fly with or without wings.  Now God  wants me to walk  or my own fear limits me to walking as Peter could not walk on water as long as Jesus did because of his lack of 'faith'.  Peter did walk on water though whereas the other disciples didn't.   I pray to fly and might in time be in a world or dimension where I can fly.  Alternatively I might 'miraculously' buy a ticket on a child guided Canadian made spaceship with a propulsion system conceived and designed by women alone.
I believe that our 'faith' is made stronger in this world as our beliefs are increased from the chaotic childhood fantasy world to the 'reality' of the 'collective' to the miraculous potential of the future.  Cellphones would have been considered miraculous once.
I believe that there are other planets inhabitted by human like forms and other aliens and other interdimensional beings. I imagine that if one can imagine something it exists in some form somewhere.  Unicorns and fairies and trolls all may exist but that I am not to be distracted in my spiritual journey by the fanciful and 'magical' but am to be devoted to the goal of coming closer to God , the true light, the word that was with Jesus as John tells us.
I believe that Jesus, the son of God, has given us the clearest vision of human potential on earth, which is in the 'love' he shared and the 'sacrifice' he made.  I think that whether a person uses a spear or a nuclear device to kill they are still primitives whereas Jesus was God like in his command to love your enemy.  That said I might well kill my enemy because I'm a 'sinner' but I wouldn't promote "killing' as the 'Way".  I believe that there have been many prophets and saints and that where their teachings meet there is the greatest likelihood of navigational truth.  
Albert Schweitzer realized that all was alive and that killing couldn't be avoided and as a doctor I am unable to be 'silly' about  death and my complicity  but must realize that it matters where my heart is too.  The scriptures tell me that I will need to see like a child again but this 'child like' innoscence is not the ignorance of children but rather the 'wisdom' that comes with experience.
I believe I have experienced miracles and witnessed miracles in my life but my tendency is to 'normalize' and 'deny' these.  Truthfully though I have no other better explanation despite my experience and training.  I consider all life is a miracle and sacred and that there are these events that are 'more' miraculous and more sacred.  They speak to the glory of God.
I do not need to 'deny' a 'virgin birth' out of 'arrogance' but can 'believe' it.  It's not really been much of an issue for me and may well be 'made up' by theologians but then everything can be seen through 'cynical' eyes.  The critic can destroy all.  If a person today claimed to be pregnant and a virgin I'd be most interested in looking at the DNA as I'd expect 'god stuff' perhaps.  Again what happened in the yesterday' has a different relevance to me 'today'.  I have no 'disbelief' that the seas opened for the fleeing Moses tribe but I also know stories 'exaggerate' with time and commonly in the past people said a thousand people were killed in a war when only a dozen were. That's at least the case in the Scottish tribal fights that I studied.  But that's History and history by convention is just an approximation of the truth for the collective imagination.  I wasn't there in this incarnation in the past as the story is told.  I don't know with certainty if there once was an age of Atlantis and we have devolved or if we are evolving moving from the Old Jerusalem to a New Jerusualem. I really don't know. It's all a matter of belief. I am suspicious of those who 'insist' that I 'believe' what they believe as if they 'need' my belief to be the same as theirs as this is what fanatics, insane people and some political leaders have been like.  I may well be wrong and they are right but I shy from 'bullying' .
Events have occurred in my life especially those times when I thought I was near to death and felt a presence of God and somehow there was a reversal of events and I lived.  The same has occurred in the process of healing.  There has also been an association between prayer and the miraculous.
I can easily 'argue' as a 'critic' and am highly trained to 'debate' the opposite, that is a purely 'material' world without 'miracles'.  I am glad for that training. It's the same training that Saint Paul had and then he was blinded and regained his sight and came to believe in miracles in a personal way.
I consider this a personal journey. I share my perception of that journey and I surely will be highly skeptical about anyone who claims to be able to levitate but I will not exclude the possibility. I'd gladly levitate alongside him.  But the fact is  I'm too much a  'doubting Thomas'.
I am a scientist and a theologian.  To me scientific theologian or theological scientist is not an oxymoron. Such was the case for most of the greatest scientists of all time as it was for Einstein and Newton.  There are a  few scientists and theologians today, who I tend to believe are simply 'lazy', and  won't  take the trouble to play three dimensional chess in a multi dimensional universe so insist that we all believe their reductionist perspective because it's self aggrandising in some way.
I remain open minded but don't believe in having such an open mind that my brains fall out. I also don't want to be so close minded that I have only a brain unmindful of the miraculousness of mind which connects us with others and with God.