Colonial

« You’re just a colonial, bloke. Without us, you’d be nobody. » said an English fellow. I was a Canadian living and working in England in the 70’s and was often mocked and bullied in this way. The English society was rigidly hieararchal.  My buddies, some working class blokes I’d met at the local pub were friendly and would always say ‘don’t mind him’ when someone would spout off .

This group I hung with were what might be termed ‘lower middle class’.  They commonly had some college education and office assistant level job.  They weren’t ‘posh’nor were they ‘common’.The rigid class system distinguished upper, middle and lower class. There didn’t seem to be much movement as position depended so much on your parents, their past, where you lived and the dialect of English you spoke. As a ‘colonial’ I was an ‘outsider’ , welcomed by some , disparaged by others. I was novel and appealing to a certain extent but if I crossed some secret law of class behaviour I was « corrected’.  « Bloody colonial. » 

I’d read some 80% or thereabouts of land in England was still owned  or controlled by some relative or ancestor of the Norman Conquerors of a thousand AD. 

Years later I was working as a doctor in a small town and this local woman approached me inviting me to a ‘party’ at her estate.  She said that ‘we’ve had a discussion about you and observed you this last year you’ve been here. We think you’d be a good addition to our social group. We’re all the right people and tend to make all the important decisions in the community together. You’d do well to join us, » she was rather pleased with herself.

I thanked her but stayed apart remembering how I’d  been rushed for several fraternities and remained aloof then too.. For a social person I’m really quite the loner. Today I most enjoy hanging out with my dog , going for walks and getting together with the girlfriend on weekends.  I have a few close friends and many acquaintances I hold fondly. I’m anxious to get close to people at my age. So many of my closest friends have died and divorces and betrayal has taken it’s toll on my trust and socialization. I feel rather raw perhaps as a nature of my work, sensitive to the ‘loudness’ of peoples emotions.  

I encounter people today who disparage me as a ‘radical’ politically but I’d characterize myself as middle of the road,  libertarian really. It’s ironic how those in their left or right bubbles believe they are in the middle.  It’s difficult being in a world where people argue constantly about two humped versus one humped camel. Frankly I don’t care much about camels.  

People often identify with the larger group to give their own meaningless insignificance value.  The family is brought into the tribe and the tribe the nation.  Now there’s the Globalist One World Order. They want everyone to identify with their latest totalitarianism.  I cringe.  So often I want to be left alone.  Often I feel even a bit paranoid as if  I’m targeted already by the Borg Like government burearocrat. If I don’t ‘conform’ I’m one of the  ‘enemy’.  

I  read Voltaire , « Patirotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings’.  Identification with the group and knowing right thing to say is fear and anxiety reducing.. 

There’s comfort and solace in being ‘in’ .  I so enjoyed reading Arendt on the ‘Banality of Evil’ after she’d seen the Nuremberg trials where everyone denied accounatability.  Robert Graves in the Golden Bough said that the choice of a king or chief was that he could be sacrificed while the group survived.  It’s like blaming the mind today as ‘he was of two minds’ and couldn’t focus whereas in the not so distant past it would be said ‘his heart wasn’t in it’.  I’m always reminded of my colleague who specialized in anal surgery. Asked why this rather than heart or brain or kidney, he replied, ‘I’ve done them all but when I could relieved a person’s constipation they were the happiest and most grateful. I get cards at Christmas from patients I saw 30 years ago ».  Not surprising we call people assholes when we’re not fond of them .

I must remember I’m loved by God and that first and foremost I must love what I am and have for so many people driving Honda’s wish they had Lamborghinie’s,  So many people poor wish to be rich.  There is never enough in this world.   reigns.The wise also warn that we should beware of what we wish for.

The Buddhist master describes the west as  suffering ‘spiritual consumerism’. It’s no surprise that addiction rules not just the gutter world but Wall Street and politics.

I’m reading David Baldacci’s the Calamity of Souls. It’s a story of a trial of a black man accused of killing white people in the south.  It’s set in the time of Rosa Parks.  

In the 70’s I eventually moved home to Canada.  I haven’t been called a ‘colonial’ in decades.  The feelings of shame have come and gone for other reasons.  Life is changing.  I still feel an outsider a lot. 

Shakespeare’s King Lear said, « So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues talk of court news , and we’ll talk with them too - Who loses and who wins who’s in who’s out - and take upon ‘s the mystery of things as if we were god’s spies,’  

Conventionality , Banality, Shame, Bullying

I remember first feeling an outsider when we moved from Toronto to Winnipeg.  The kids in the neighbourhood had a pecking order and they bullied me.  I was the ‘different’ kid. I was made fun of.  I was cheated.  My father was away working. My mother was depressed and lonely separated from her family and her church.  My brother was my rock but he too was facing his wars.  He had a thicker skin. I’d learn later he was just better at hiding the pain.  We were outsiders.

I’ve spoken to the children of soldiers, corporate leaders, and diplomats. We all share the experience of ‘stranger in a strange land’.  Position authority is the power one gets from remaining.  These are the big fish in a small pond.

I have always Allied with the ‘underdog’, the ‘outsider’, the ‘outcast’.  When I look back on what the differences were that we were mocked and bullied, the first that comes to mind is being Christian.  The secular kids were comfortable with the dog eat dog, social Darwinism, struggle of the jungle.  They didn’t have a creed that said ‘love the other’.  They didn’t hold their punches. They didn’t need to tell the truth.  They associated with others who revelled in glory, greed and violence.  

I began fighting physically at five.  I don’t remember fights in Toronto.  My grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles, mom and dad and brother and all my neighbourhood friends were there. It was a safe place of play.  In Winnipeg a kid punched me.  I punched back.  His older brother and his friends came next. I punched more. I was hurt by the mob.  I’d made some friends but they were geeks and outsiders like me.  Dad bought us boxing gloves and set up a ring in the basement.  He taught us boxing. He taught my friends Garth and Kirk and I had to protect ourselves.  Dad was Air Force.

The bullies parents were businessmen and lawyers.  When they came back we fought back better.  They were the secular kids. They were the aetheists. They weren’t the Catholics. Some might have been the Anglicans.  We were Baptists and we kind of aligned with the United Church kids.  Mom was staunchly baptist.  There was one Jewish kid and one black kid.  They’d be my friends. Like the geniuses.  They’d be my friends too. 

I was forever seeing some bully going after some little guy and I’d wade in and come to their defence. I was often fighting guys who picked on girls. I fought the kid who was giving wedgies to the girls and ripped their panties off. Looking back he was a bit twisted and ended up in the principals office. Likely today he’s on a sex offender list.

The bully I fought as a teenager, him and his two friends, later went to jail. He was the son of a rich lawyer businessman and became a serial rapist.  His accountant friend and he got a stash of the date rape drug and used it all through their college years till they were caught in their 30’s with a trail of victims in the hundreds.  The family money hushed up the story. 

Years later when a local judge got caught for pedophilia it was in the news only a day.  The story of the priest was in the news all year. 

My friend and I were the first ones in high school to challenge conventionality. We stopped shaving and had beards. Principal Zotolov called us into the Principal’s office. Kirk and I were told to shave. We didn’t.  I’d already defended the girls wearing pants bringing in the motion for women to be allowed to wear slacks and fighting it through the student council , bringing it to the principal and school board. A long lesson in the powers of conventionality. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.

The Vice President gathered all the girls together along with the Principal arguing against my motion and demanding that the girls vote to wear skirts in 40 below weather.  The teacher’s pet gave a speech and she called me homosexual for wanting women to wear slacks. I don’t even know if I knew what that was.  I’d be called faggot and a lot of other names for being ‘different’.  

I was a tall kid. I’ve been told I was good looking. I dated cheer leaders and models and later married the most beautiful and brightest of women. I never felt okay.  

The principal had a beard growing contest and it became apparent that there was a lot testosterone in the guys in the older classes.  Cavemen sorts.  Football players who were beard farmers in weeks. Kirk and I had poor crops by comparison. He was hairier by far but the principal won that round.  I fought back with wearing suits and ties.  Ultra conventionality.  Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.  We outdressed the staff. I fell in love with sports jackets and nifty ties, especially those wool woven one.  

 Any time I did something different I was mocked and treated with disdain, shamed by others.  I was physically strong and athletic.  Grandad was a rancher.  Dad hunted and fished. We did a lot of physical labour.  Roofing construction , growing up.  Mom encouraged us to read.  I loved to read. I loved to ride my bicycle and explore.

Dad liked country music. My brother liked Elvis. Mom liked Gospel. I liked the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.  

Kirk and I were the kids who moved through many groups. We were both jocks, provincial champion athletes.  We’d been to the YMCA together and excelled in gymnastics, swimming and volleyball. It wasn’t the football team or the basketball team but I’d played hockey till high school.  The guys accepted us.  Until the boozers and rock and roll music. The Rolling Stones crowd and getting drunk and getting drivers licenses.  We got girlfriends instead and were more intellectual. I joined the theatre club and the Manitoba Theatre School and wrote poetry. More mockery.  

There were these ‘greasers’ back then and they did poor in school and got into drugs and liked to ‘rumble’.  I stopped enjoying fighting when I was knifed and had to conceal the wounds from my mom. .Kirk and I learned Jujitsu.  I would be surrounded by a gang of guys with motorcycles and bicycles.  I’d block dozens of knife stabs but one got through.  I have the scar today.

Shame. I’d have liked to have fought back, not just been defensive but my friend had done that weeks before and he’d been swarmed.  He spent weeks in hospital.  A serious head injury. He’d later be in jail for small time crimes and I’d be his psychiatrist years later my heart torn out for my friend and me thinking it could have been me. I listened to him tell me how he woke up stupid and how difficult those next years were. He’d been one of the brightest guys I knew

The school didn’t protect us from bullies. The police didn’t protect us from bullies. One of the worst bullies was the son of the judge. The police chief’s daughter was the worst.  

Hierarchies go back generations.  When I was in England I saw that some cliques lasted hundreds of years.

By the time I was expelled from high school I’d been stabbed for being a geek.  I was different.  If you excell the conventional guys are jealous.  When we won a game we couldn’t leave the locker room till the police arrived because the other team had knives and brass knuckles and were screaming “you fucking won the game but now we’ll show you who wins when we play our game’.  

One kid had failed high school a half dozen times.  He told me once years later, “ In high school I was somebody.  I could beat up any of you kids. I always had some younger girl to fuck.  I was somebody.  When I left high school I was just the stupid loser”.

I was going to church and studying the bible and president of the amalgamated baptist youth groups.  “I don’t want to talk about god and all that shit, I’m just interested in booze and pussy, you fucking freak,”. 

I fit in in the theatre.  We were a group of outsiders. I was adept at dancing. The gymnastics and athletics and martial arts prepared me for the early work as a stunt man and later as a dancer.  

I felt like I belonged on our school volleyball teams. I made a few good friends in student government.  My friend Kirk and I moved apart a bit when Garth died, when I left gymnastics and the leaders club and focused on poetry, music, and coffeehouses.  Our school friend Danny stayed in music.  I helped organize a dozen or more coffee houses around the city and was co manager of Wise Eye for two or three years.  The Winnipeg Folk Festival arose out of the coffeehouse scene.  Jim Donahue brought Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen’s music to Winnipeg.  My friend Jon Cowtan introduced jazz guitar and music was the thing then.  I was writing poetry with Karen Asselstine, the extraordinarily talented daughter of a psychiatrist, all round creative artist who’d go on to have her own fashion chains out of Toronto at one time designing clothes for celebrities wanting eco friendly wear way ahead of the times.  Heady days.

Having got drunk I’d avoided alcohol but was happy enough when someone would pass a joint around or offer me a hit of acid. I was a roadie for a bit.  I was raped and betrayed that summer.  I went hungry but was only days homeless.  My brother and mother met with me and Dad brought me home , the prodigal son.

I ‘d felt apart of in theatre and in poetry.  I was called an intellectual. I was told I was smart by people who used that word as an insult.  I read a lot.  In dance the other dancers only really magazines while I read books, classics, science, philosophy literature.

I met Baiba.  She was a dancer and her family were immigrants.  I learned old world values. I learned anti communism. I met White Russians and people who’d lived under Marxist dictatatorships and had seen so many of their friends die. The Jewish kids were into Marx and Utopianism.  Jews like Jews.  Part of their love of Marx and Freud and even Einstein was they were Jewish.  I loved the love of community among my Jewish friends. 

 Baiba and her family were involved in the cultural affairs as Latvians.  Theirs was a community. I loved their song fests and dinners.  Years later I’d participate in the Scottish Irish rites but while Mom celebrated her Irish background Dad didn’t connect with his Scottish roots.  He’d had a falling out with his very old scot father when he’d left the ranch and gone Industrial era becoming mechanic, millwright and engineer loving machines more than horses.  Grandad liked ranching and logging. I had an uncle who was a true cowboy all his life, lived in the saddle.  Dad rode well. I rode with him and his friends and they rode horses like I rode bicycles but Dad loved his trucks and cars. He was a spitfire mechanic in the Air Force and a Bomber before he went on to get his Engineering diploma.  He was in charge of hundred a fifty men on big conveyor belt projects for airports and post office and grocery stores.  With the agreement of the Canadian government he met Castro and help get the Cuban conveyors working again.

My brother was angry that he didn’t wear suits. He only wore suits to please mom. At church and at the political events Mom was involved in. She’d become a journalist involved in community and church and big with the local city politics.  I never knew my parents in so many ways. I was so self absorbed so long.  I liked to be left alone.  I was a high achieving brooding kid.  I was struggling with philosophivial and theological question and reading the great poets and wanting to be the renaissance man, doing all those things an actor does, learning lines, fencing, dancing, doing voice training. All round development but struggling competitively with choreography , shows, television appearances.  

I was in love with Baiba. I felt at home with Ken Mathew’s Dance School. My room mate Fern was a great guy . The girls were extraordinary, stunningly beautiful, accomplished, show dancers. Baiba was brilliant reading books like me.  They were exotic creatures and we were all ‘going to make it, to be stars’.  Antonio was going to be a businessman .  Clarkey could have been.  Her partner had been in the ice follies and talked of glory days on his second bottle of vodka.  We were a family of sorts.  Halcyon days.

I felt very much a part of the group.  I had my family. I had my family at the Y. I had my family in Volleyball.  I had my family in the Manitoba Theatre School.  I had a girlfriend Nina who had friends and we were acting and were into art and the occult. Mysticism. A friend in the Rosicrucian’s. Friends heading off to missionaries in Africa.

Then I was in the music poetry scene but there wasn’t a family there.

In dance there was a family. I had friends and then Nancy and then Baiba and a whole world of feeling inside. Even in the Latvian cultural world.  But I was an outsider.  Actors were different as artists.  The world was lawyers, administrators, beurocrats, accountants.  I was a dancer and I’d be called a faggot.  I was an artist and the ‘conventional’ kids in uniforms and safe in mob numbers would mock us.  I had long hair. I’d be shot at. Bullets whizzing by my head.  “You fucking long haired hippy. Look like a girl.”

I’d be chased through the woods after being picked up hitchhiking by four ‘red neck jocks’.  “Let’s kill us a fucking hippie’.  I ran fast and long when I jumped from that moving car and looked over my shoulder at these guys with baseball bats and tire irons.

I was wearing a skirt and high heels on Davie street when some Surrey Brown guys cruised by and nearly stopped. I felt totally vulnerable in sling backs. These South Asian gang guys were cruising and beating up transvestites. The police caught them later.  I thought of my friend with a brain injury.  My patient today has a claw hand. Homeless people, drug addicts with a pit bull did’t have the pit bull chained when she walked by down town. The pit bull grabbed her hand and crushed it. She’s old like me and can’t use her hand any more. It’s constant pain. They killed the dog.  The dog wasn’t the one that needed punishment There was no compensation. The new world order has lots of people doing damage on the streets, criminals acting for the government , scaring us all, marauding through the city, pillaging, stealing and mobbing just like the Nazis before Hitler finally won. They call themselves ‘antifida’ today. Claim to be anti Nazis.  More nazi than Nazis. Lenin spawn. I see the evil in government and recognised the totalitarianism of Trudeau and today’s liberals and federal NDP.  I’ve read history. I E read books. It puts me at extreme variance from the magazine readers.  I’m mobbed when I write anything ‘unconventional’. I’m threatened when I still speak of Jesus.  Love.  Secularism is the cammoflage for aetheist communism. I’m not anything but a Christian who says Jesus said Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself. I struggle with morals and ethics and took an oath a couple of times to do no harm. I don’t fit. I feel like the only vegetarian in a tribe of cannibals.  I live in fear of when they’ll turn on me again.

I’d prayed to be conventional. I was in the middle and feeling good in the group in medical school.  I liked psychiatry till the professor fucked me and it was not what I wanted . I was struggling with marriage and drunken in laws and a depressed wife and no sex and her saying ‘women don’t like oral sex’ while that’s all she liked and she grew so strange and pretentious and I was in the insaniety of struggling with all that came with country and northern practice and then psychiatry.  So much time with outsiders.  She was so conventional and so wanted to be conventional and money was so important and social status was so important.  I was an outsider.

My friendswere rock and rollers then and motorcyclists  and musicians and they smoked dope. My friends were artists and they were outsiders.

I remember the day my senior administrate doctor upon graduation took me aside and told me that I was a doctor now and that doctors only associated with other professionals like lawyers , accountants and other doctors, that I’d have to avoid other people. He said we were ‘officers’ now and couldn’t mix with the ‘others’.  

You’re a white man, you shouldn’t be helping the Indians.”

You shouldn’t hang with the Jews. They’re not your kind.

You re not Irish. You’re Protestant. Irish doctors are catholic, he said. 

I still cry.

I’m so alone.

In AA I felt a sense of family. IDAA was and still is the best of family. I still worry people will laugh at me. To be the best I’ve always had to start the worst over and over agin. I envy the one trick pony. 

I ‘ve made such good friends and then they began to die.  So many have died these last few years.

I’m so alone.  

I did yoga when it was ‘weird’.  I did Tai Chi when it’s was ‘weird’.  I was vegetarian when it was ‘weird’. Then I hunted when it was weird,

I don’t know if I’m just more sensitive to the abuse, I suspect my mind plays back being shot at for having long hair, being told by wife that your friends aren’t the ‘right type of people’.  I joke and say ‘alcoholic alzheimer’s’ is where you forget everything but the ‘resentments’.

But I know my enemy is the one who teaches me my weakness I know i project my inner unresolved conflicts. I envy the Liberals around Trudeau and his coven.  He’s like the high school ‘in crowd’ who surrounded this kid who became a serial rapist.  No one talks about it.  But they must have felt really close and family till some ‘bitch’ broke up their fuck fest.

I’ve stopped so much corruption and crime in my time.  I ‘ve had a half dozen pedophiles or more arrested. I’ve been glad to stop serial rapeists and even murderers.  I don’t have a protective group. The government here protected the psychopaths in their group.

I won. The corrupt thieving hospital administrator was removed. The lying drunk head of Psychiatry was removed. I was called a ‘non team player’, a ‘trouble maker’, a ‘Jew lover’, an ‘Indian lover’.  I was un -Canadian for my friendship with immigrants.  I was a loser.

Now I feel alone, The slurs and bullying come back and I see the thugs all over again. They feel cozy like Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Motlotov must have felt. They had their tribe.

Now I get laughed at for wearing a dress. I was laughed at for wearing a beard.

I was laughed at for wearing a suit and tie. I was laughed at when I got beat up but then went off and trained in martial arts and came back and 6 months later when the gang mob me again I kicked two in the head and broke the nose of another leaving three guy bleeding in the snow and the rest running. I did’t feel good.   I felt ‘even’.  I felt I’d done the right thing and stopped these shits. I’ve stopped a dozen rapes in progress and stepped into so many fights to break it up.  My therapist said he thought I liked to fight and was scanning for scenarios where I could be the good guy in a fight. At the time I thought I was a pacifist.

Now I’m old and these fights wake me from sleep, nightmares and this feeling of how unprotected I’ve been, how I’ve paid millions to government and the police and authorities have been a kleptocracy.”

I’m so disillusioned feeling unsafe in old age. My back has hurt for over a year and I don’t feel I can fight off attackers. I don’t feel I can physically defend myself and I see the gangs roaming the streets and the government saying we can’t defend ourselves.  Every day I hear of another older person in Vancouver beat up. Everyday I hear of patients afraid to go outside. Covid was bad but agoraphobia is safe and smart in a dangerous city of terrible violence and criminality that’s covered up.  The governments are so corrupt, 

I’m afraid

I’m different . I want to hide in conventionality. But i struggle to be authentic.  I can’t conceal being old.

I don’t know what it is. 

I wish I’d focussed on money instead of learning and science and art and healing and I could have 7 body guards and armed people surrounding me. I wish I could sue people for defamation I wish I could have laws against Christophobia like the Homophobia, Judeaophobia, Islamophobia groups.  I wish the new immigrants didn’t go in gangs I wish they didn’t mug me and punch me and scare me to the core. I wish I wasn’t such a coward.  I have faced gangs and protected a child being berated by a bunch of drunks and I’ve fought them back ….I’ve got some scars I got in self defence…..but now I’m just paranoid. And afraid.  

I was so sorry to see my friend sick and alone and not having the ability to get up and get food. I was so thankful she had friends to bring her groceries.  I don’t have children and protected my mom and dad in their old age. My brother protected them too.

I don’t feel I have protection,

It’s always the poor me too, the sucking on the tit of despair,

Everyday I fight with the gratitude I’m thankful to be a live. I’ve this great little dog buddy. I have a roof over my head, indoor plumbing, a freezer, I even had the air conditioning fixed yesterday. I have phone service, I have internet.

God has been with me all the time. I’m alive I’ve survived. I’m blessed.  I’m outside but I have friends.  The Governemtn hates doctors today and have stolen all their money. All my career I’ve worked without the resources and personnel I was promised and watched as the courts and government offices became fat. No it’s contractors . All the time there’s the criminals too. The 80 billions dollar weeks black market industry and all these mafia sorts ‘good old boys’ , like the Kennedy booze runners ahead and clever and their kids in the best schools.  Now it’s the fentanyl dealers in league with the Communist China Military and the money launderers in casinos and real estate.  

I’m thankful for the sun.  

I m late for work. Altruism calls. Everyday another person tells me how much more difficult it is for them.  I feel I have so little left after the government took everything.  I have so little I can do to help. Local government does it’s best but Trudeau took the money for doctors and nurses and medical care and gave it to his pet projects where he could get votes, to corrupt and stupid people.  

I’m trying to talk to God to be above this to just think with love that Trudeau is sick not bad, that it’s the media, it’s perception. It’s all God and I’m struggling to see it as Jesus would.  I’ve not been very good at this.  I have to squeeze the pus out of my brain and try over and over again every day to give my head a shake and focus on the positive.

I’m so grateful for the sun and clean air and I’m alive.

Thank you Jesus.

Soft Nightmares

Obviously they’re bad dreams. But they’re not quite nightmares.  Trapped and disturbing but not horrifying. I learned long ago to not get upset in a flurry and wake up. Mostly I just work my way through lucid dreaming, looking for a way out. Sometimes I wake up to restart.

There’s the poop dreams. I remember coming into the room on the ward and he’d smeared the room with his poop. It wasn’ t a one time experience. Others smeared themselves in poop.  Trying to hold them down to give them an injection, I’d be  trying to avoid the eye gouges. Wondering where to wash the clothes or discard them after. Wearing OR scrubs till I could get a new change.standing in showers clothed washing the poop out of the body curled on the floor in a fetal position. I was thankful for others, the nurses who did it mostly. I came and went. They lived with this day and day, night after night. I wasn’t always there.

Toilets in Africa and India. Shit everywhere. Outhouses in the north with shit everywhere. Their airport toilets where they squatted on the seats and never cleaned up the massive misses. Not a dribble. Shit everywhere. 

In my dream I can’t open a door because there’s shit on the door handle.  I’m in an institution like a college looking for a place to sit and all the toilet seats are covered in shit.  I want to shower but the shower is dirtier than I am.

I suppose a Freudian might suggest homosexual issues but anal sex isn’t same sex alone. There’s nothing sexual about the dreams. Pre sexual. Toilet training days. Maybe shame based. Primordial. Disturbing. Disappointing.  Frustrating. I often have the urge to go.  That need to pee or poop at night and eventually waking to use the toilet only to return to the poop dream. Searching for somewhere clean.  Dirty world dream.

I was in a room, a very nice room but the wall opened. The room was the perfect study call room, bed and desk and books.  Only the wall kept being pushed in by a party next door , drunks staggering into my space and I have to show them out and resecure the accordion wall.  Time and again. Trying to sleep on call and the noise of nursing stations and inability to find quiet.  The party in the next apartment. The guy sticking a butcher knife to my throat when I ask him to turn his stereo down at 4 am.  The cranked out psychotic addicts coming to my door and demanding I stop pounding on my ceiling or floor and I’m sleeping, trying to sleep. Years of begging for quiet and sleep. Now I’m back in those nights

My mentor is visitting, someone older and esteemed and they’re at the apartment, clothed in my idealization sand projections, inhuman perfection. butthere’s a cigarette, or dope or a vibrator or a banned book and I find it as they come in. I’m adjusting my fig leaf before God. If there’s a woman she’s always sassy with the Apple or terrified hiding behind me. The days my friends invited professors to stag parties and drunken birthday parties because they were outside the hierarchy and wanted to brush shoulders with the great men and women I knew. When I had compartmentalized worlds. I still have compartmentalized worlds. Facets of the diamond. Trying always to remember which are vegans and wearying of the work of pleasing the potters.

Long ago memories and the dreams that percolate through. I wonder about the nights like that.  Old nights with too much to drink or smoke and trying to be ‘normal’ and not being ‘normal’ and wanting to sleep and being at some social event with an ex or someone else and I’m supposed to be paying attention and my eyes are spinning in my head and I can’t stay awake. I’m so tired yet I’m in a dream and I can’t fall asleep. I wake and I can’ t fall asleep.  

Somewhere there’s a psychopath passing me. I see him and know. He’s a cannibal or a pedophile or a drug pusher and he’s passing through my room. I’ve not kept the door closed tight enough to keep the devil out and he’s okay with me. I’m immune but he’s using me to get to the innoscent and naive I know. He’s just a step a head of me in the dream and I’m intent on killing him to protect the children but he always has those in government or the police that protect him and I will go to jail if I hurt him and he’s always gloating.  Psychopaths looking over their shoulders laughing at me. I’m weak. I can take him but I can’t get at him because of all his protectors in high place. And I’m being held back from killing him or me or them or something I’ve alienated. The face laughing at me on the other side of the glass.

All is God and yet I must choose. I choose the good and it’s me a hit man in my dream and some innoscent looking with dismay at the service I’ve done. I’m covered in blood. I’ve saved a life and they’ve turned away disgusted with soldiers and surgeons.  Psychotic women living delusions and lies preferring their gilded cages and masters to freedom, antiseptic lives I’m playing in dirt, walking through the wild. I’m in those places only God knows. There’s no way but through here. The manure is fertilizer for the flowers. I’m delivering babies again. It’s not pretty and yet it is. 

 I’m walking away across deserts knowing the oasis is just a little further. The demons in the forest are afraid of me. The devil only catches stragglers. The war is won.  I’m alone longer than anyone I know. I’ve held on longer. And hold on another day. Then I’m among those again with discipline.  Our eyes meet and we know. It’s old souls and baby souls and out past the wire. It’s exclusive and inclusive. We’re waiting for the last one so we can all pass together into heaven. I worry I’m holding everyone up until I know it doesn’t matter.   Uncertainty.  I’m at the cross. I’m in the glade. I’m beneath the sea. I’m gliding on the wings of a bird.  I awake with lingering dreams and every emotion.  It takes a moment to realize I’m here again. In this life. 

And I wonder what the meaning is.  Always the dark side - shame, envy, remorse, resentment, fear. And it’s not important anymore. 

God loves me. I love God.  I used to spend days and nights on my knees or sitting cross legged years of prayer and meditation. I learned to slow my heart so it was as if I was dead, breathing so long and shallow that I was near to dead. My mind lit up and the presence of God and heaven palpable. I’ve talked with Jesus. Sat with saints. Been present in the most austere moments. And loved. Angels naked in my bed, the brilliance in flesh and light. The explosions of intimacy. I’ve known bliss in his world and out of this world. Now I’m just here. Mostly raising a puppy. Cleaning up his poop and pee and realizing that critics don’t know blood. They’ve lived pristine lives in little square and cubicles and are afraid. Who am I to judge. Live and let live.   It’s okay to be afraid. Existential angst. But Jesus did say , do not be afraid. There’s a main stream. I’m an outlier. I’m a guide or scout on the edge, riding point. The natives are mostly friendly.

There’s a place in my dreams where there a boat and a great sprawling luxury apartment complex. There’s a place where mothers sit at tables and drink tea and I’m a little boy crawling at their feat. There are white water rapids which I’m body surfing. There are intimate conversations with classical guitars and violins.  I’m with friends and we’re drinking coffee. The aromas of incense are in the air. A cello and a saxophone are being played. Ballet is danced. I’m in the embrace of the most beautiful and she is smiling and we Viennese waltz in clouds. The sun is rising with pink colours over a delicious rocky coast. 

I’m lost in some dreams, trying to find the way out of maizes encountering others desperate while I’m just plodding along, no longer afraid, just tired.  The journey seems forever then I remember to look at the details and it’s no longer about the arrival but about the journey.  

Sometimes my insides are not in my body but leaking out of me and I’m trying to put them back knowing it’s futile and letting myself slip into the horror passing through to another room.  Lucid dreaming, catching the fear, riding it like a wave. Adjusting the sails, praying for fair winds and following seas.  The lesson only seems to be .’this too will pass’. Walking in the fragrance of roses and gardens that go on for ever. The Holy Spirit and a princess.  I’m naming things.  Laughter in the sunlight.

Then I’m in poo and piss and blood and I can’t hold onto the tissue that keeps slipping from my fingers and there’s an artery spraying blood on my glasses blinding my eyes. The nurse is helping in one dream and in another she’s screaming like the Scream in horror and I’m alone without another pair of hands and the patient is awake and dying.  I’m unable to save every life and they come and go. I’m facing failures rarely but they’re all I think about. The successes are so easily forgotten. The comedy routine where they all don’t laugh. I m back on stage forgetting my lines. Then I’m in the embrace of a goddess whose name I’ve forgotten but I’m on that peninsula, my little bit of heaven where it’s safe and there are great white table  meals, like a five star hotel, and it’s clean.

I like that it’s clean.  I like fresh clothes. I’m in a rocket ship going from galaxy to galaxy and I love the view and I love the clean  clothes but  the air isn’t as fresh as the air by the mountain streams.  I’m climbing in the woods. Dogs are with me. Sometimes a cat. Mostly there are the occasional strangers.  I’m mostly alone and they’re passing happier somehow and I’m an outsider.

It’s after a major catastrophe and there are huge snakes underground and the avalanche has happened. Tectonic shifts of plates and whole cities have disappeared. I’m back watching the volcanic lava burning away everything in its path. I see the two drunken doctors ride by in their side car motorcycle. I’m admiring their insanity and joie to vie. I’m thinking and observing too much, trying to carefully get out of the mud, away from the crocodiles, snakes and predators, escaping to where I don’t know. I’m going one dream at a time.

Waking sometimes. Curious. Wondering what the hell was that about. It’s a long time now since the nightmares.  She says I don’t scream in my sleep any more. The feel of dead bodies doesn’t alarm me anymore.  I’m okay with that. I’m no longer grilled in the court house by the stupid shrill little girl with her memory books and pretty notes asking me detail of a far too different past. I’ve been there and I’m always reporting back to these people who fear reality and use me as a buffer but abuse me to cover their fear and stupidity. Hothouse plant girls and boys.  Monday morning quarterbacks.

I’m no longer fighting gangs of men in 10s and 20’s doing the bully pile on and feeling good about themselves. I’m not playing golf with the guy who pulls out a gun and shoots me because he doesn’t like my perfect shot. I don’t have these betrayals or stupid authorities or spiders . I’m shooting monsters with ray guns and hand guns. I’m piloting rocket ships. I have my own flitter and amphibious hovercraft. . I’m swimming under water with gils. 

It’s safer today. The sad dreams are like an old wound healed but with the poop and pustulence still oozing occasionally. I  carry on. This too will pass.  I know not to cling to the good. I look past the bad.  I sail from place to place. I’m unhappy with the poop, and piss and puss,  but it’s okay.  The blue skies, sunshine and starlets, puppies and kittens all reappear and I’m walking through green fields with a stave and good shoes.  This too will pass.  I’m learning. If only I can remember its an adventure. So much is perception. Practicing the presence.

Life Review

I have examined and reviewed my life yet again.

On the negative side:

1. I continue to have guilt and shame about sexual behaviour in the past and ongoing concerns and confusion. I recall this theme in my earliest teen age journals. I loved Portnoy’s Complaint, a classic in therapy novels. No I didn’t masturbate on the family Hamm. I have however broken many societal taboos though not the law per se. I have been punished considerably for my transgression by ostracization, physical abuse and major financial losses. I feel now I’m in my 60’s I should really lighten up on myself.  I have been accepting and understanding and non judgemental of others. I have friends from the tightest to the lowest expression. I don’t think of them sexually when I’m with them. I don’t ogle or demean them.  I believe that I put myself under a microscope in this regard and need to be less judgemental of myself.  

The golden key is ‘Love God.  Love thy neighbour as yourself”.  On this scale, a spiritual likkert scale as it were I’m well advanced on the ‘love thy neighbour but need to be more loving of myself.  

I love the expression that I shouldn’t judge people who sin differently.  We live in a world of sinners, Sinners Anonymous central really.  I mustn’t accept societals’ confusion in this regard anymore than I accept societal’s even greater fixation with war and violence.

2. I continue to be lacking in gratitude. I have by outward standards the greatest life. I’d want none other . Yet rather than celebrating what I have I’m always focusing on what I want and what I don’t have even though at this point in life I’ve mostly had what I don’t have today sometime in the past.  I really do need to be more grateful.

3.  I have clutter. I love the minimalist life and have lived Walden Pond with great joy. I see that when I’ve been more at peace with myself with less ‘business’ ‘chasing the dollar’ ‘responding to everyone elses’ ‘emergencies’ ‘threats’ ‘demands’, I’ve been happiest and loved life more .  I need to mosey more in that direction away from those threatening bullying cowardly forces that so negatively influence me.

4. I have since a child not been anti authority but keenly aware of ‘abuse of power’ . I was asked once why I was in so many fights. Mostly I have been defending others from bullying, attacks, gross misjustice. I have brought tremendous abuse on myself , usually indirect for getting in the way of corruption.  I feel I’m too old to be helping so many underdogs and want to give up the torch to some younger folk but I see the younger people brain washed and propagandize by these very bullies who were there when I was in the peace march, who demanded I work long hours and weekends and evening  for their profit.  I don’t know what to do about this.  I fear for my future and the future of those aging in Canada right now.  I don’t know I’ll have any worldly knights but trust I will have angels and have known God’s protection. Yet the abuses I’ve seen of the old and sick concern me and I’m aging and seeing obvious things, rich fat cat incompetent undertrained totally political hospital administrations who can’t even make room for the patients but instead have used hall ways for decades.  I was promised hospital beds and investigations for my patients and downstream psychologists and counselling but it’s not materialized.  It’s mismanaged and misused with “Marx turning Engels on his head’. The least trained least experienced have the greatest control and power and financial reward while those like me with the greatest training greatest experience and most evidence of excellence have been stripped of our leadership role so that a political administrative class can grow like cancer.  I have seen this theme grow in the last 10 years.

5. I have been political this last 4 years feeling that a PM who admits to being impaired mentally, criminal in his behaviour and generally having only ‘dynastic’ ‘brand’ power and a corrupt Quebec mafia lead power base is doing egregious harm to the economy and my patients , the marginalized. His drug addiction and flaunting it with profit driven ‘legalization ‘ of drugs (not decriminalization as we all supported) is directly impacting on me. I smoked marijuana and drank wine. I paid a million dollars in time and money and activity because I was honest and upfront about my use of substance though I was never ever as impaired as the PM and truly not as arrogant or offensive. It is karma to see aspects of myself on big stage and I want never to be so insensitive to others as I was at times. I am thankful that I have not smoked marijuana or cigarettes in 22 years.  I gave up alcohol not because I drank more or excessively but that I binged and when I did on holidays mostly I picked up smoking and did things I wouldn’t have done sober. I took ‘unnecessary risks’ when drinking though if the truth be known I had immense pleasures. The smoking was killing me and I couldn’t stay quit smoking nicotine or marijuana because I’d pick it up drinking.  I see our leadership as commonly impaired by drugs and alcohol and other addictions. I don’t like it. It’s been an issue for me politically the last 5 years. I am ‘critical’ of politics and politicians and would be more celebratory of those who do good. It’s in this one arena that I have to change. If the Liberals were to win I’d want to leave Canada. I can’t stand seeing this country I love destroyed like Venezuela or Russia.  I don’t want to grow old here. I don’t feel safe here any more.  I see this involvement in politics with political affiliation, voting and financial contribution as a ‘active democrat’.  I am a participant. I see a lot who criticize but don’t take a stand. When you stand up you make yourself a target.  I used to love sitting on the fence, the safe and cowardly position of the ‘agnostic’ and the person who ‘likes all parties a bit’.  I would appreciate a better legal and political system but am an active member of the one we have now. I’m a realist. I have gone door to door, sat on phones, and participated in all levels of government seeing it as ‘dutiful’.  Facebook critics are painful children in most part many not diaper trained, all talk and no action.  I’m not. I’ve been billy clubbed and the freedoms others have today I’ve contributed to their having in action and financially.  I know who cares by where and what they put their money on. Most people only care for themselves and their immediate families, like animals.

6. I have tried to ‘love my enemies.’  I’m doing better at this and at forgiving but I remain vengeful and fearful. Though frankly it’s been a long time since I woke people in their bedrooms late at night to ‘discuss their problem’.  I’ve not cased peoples residences and routes in decades. I’m just trying not to ‘rent a space in my brain for free’ for them now mostly. I’m trying to focus on the positive.  I’m seeing in my thoughts and feelings and what comes uppermost in my mind about people especially those who have stolen my money and my time by betrayal and greed and dishonesty remain a sore spot despite having 4th stepped and prayed and given them over to God. I keep picking up the sore like the good Irish Scottish blooded person I have. I even hope that their will be an amnesty on my ‘forgiving sort’ and we’ll have an ‘open season’ on our enemies so I can hunt down and torture and kill those still living. Few are still living. The fact is I rather like those that hurt me too. The older I get this individuals who caused me grief seem more human and I have little anger at them The ‘institutions’ and those in them that abused their power or failed in their duties, those I still loathe.  I recognize that these insitutions are critical and important but object to the ‘systems’ as they multiply errors so easily and their lack of transparency make them really sick.  Corruption is evil. Yet compared to other countries and other systems this isn’t so bad though I fear it’s present detour into increasing madness.

On the positive side:

1. My life has been blessed untoward by loving parents, family, and teachers and friends and mentors and learning. I’ve really been able to meet and know the greatest and for every ‘glych’ in the relationships there’s been a million benefits. My perception and fear and resentment have been the problem. Even ‘breaking up’ with girls I’ve lacked knowledge and finesse to do it more ‘smoothly’ less hurtfully , more kindly. Looking back I see that we were unable to resolve differences and that while we shared the ‘broad strokes’ the devil was in the details’. I married for children and felt a wife or two wanted to be the ‘child’.  I had these great ‘buddies’ and still do.  I’ve been blessed with companions.  I’m so thankful to have know such incredible loves. I’ve done 10 years of monogamy and committed adultery and been cuckolded and tried a threesome and experienced sex with men and been transvestic but the best love and sex was in a loving monogamous marriage yet the worst love and sex were in monogamous loving marriage.  I loved the Art of Loving. Falling in love and marriage is great but divorce is the nightmare.  I understand people today not wanting to risk but know that without risk there can never been the greatest gains. So single people seem mostly to have safe shallow lives’ lives of quiet desperation’.  I’ll always love that I’ve loved and lost and feel only sadness for those who never played the game.  

2. I have had great adventures.  I’ve been blessed to study at the university. I’ve never got over the joy of looking in my first electron microscope. I’m still delighted to take a history and physical and see my findings ‘confirmed’ by lab and testing like MRI’s . I love the pictures. But it’s only been first through history that 90% have arisen and 9% through physical. Only 1% or less of the time has a ‘lab’ result ‘surprised me’.  The lab has in 40 years of medicine served only to ‘confirm’ my diagnosis and provide direction to therapy. Today I’m a better diagnosticician than I ever was because today I’m the best diagnostician I know, like the teachers of old I so admired.  But I don’t have time.  I’m denied collateral. I’m surrounded by doctors with no time and consults that are deceitful and withholding. I’m routinely finding that the patients don’t want their doctors to know things or their insurance company or courts or lawyers. This deceitfulness double and triples the time I spend. Malingering and factitious disorders and sociopathy are fueled by the system and the College of Physicians and Surgeons is collectively hurting patients and medicine by their self serving rigidity.  They’re 19th century in a 21st century world. I’ve been blessed to be at the front lines where I can see the 21st century. I’m in the present and this is a blessing. I’m very thankful for this in work. I’ve seen amazing cures in cancer and other infectious diseases. I’ve seen the advances in AIDs treatment and in diagnostic clarification and treatment and surgery and stem cell research. I can see a patient who would have died a decade ago live. I can think of the many patietns I knew who died because they had illnesses which we had no cure for at the time. I can see schizophrenics having good lives and people being cured of strokes who’d have dragged limbs or been in wheel chairs int he past. It’s exciting to be here seeing this NASA like world of science and the breakthroughs every day.

I have had the adventures in travel, canoeing, hiking, bicycling across Europe, sailing the west coast then sailing solo in winter hurricanes to the Hawaii Islands, sailing back with crew.  I’ve driving cars and vans across Canada and the northern states, motorcycling to Sturges and back 5000 km, and flying to most continents, going to countries I only dreamed of.  I love camping. I love my camper. I ve been so blessed.

3. I’ve had a rich spiritual life, with out of body experience, experience of parallel spiritual realms, encounters with angels, seeing heaven, visitations from the dead, countless and relatively routine mystical insights and experiences.  Even being ‘psychologically minded’ has meant I’ve been able to tolerate the tension of opposites. I’ve been able to work and succeed in this limited physical world while aware of the greater world. I’ve been truly a spiritual being living a material existence and had many reminders of this especially when I’ve lost track. I’ve a deep relationship with God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and am thankful. I’ve had access to immense spiritual resources and advanced training in Church and University and Ashrams and Monasteries. I’ve been touched by holy men and women. I’ve prayed and meditated and followed in the paths of those who have lead so well.

4. I’ve had these great pets and raised animals and plants and so enjoyed nature. I’ve delivered a hundred babies and been with as many dying. I’ve been a child therapist, a family therapy, a group therapist and marriage therapist and individual therapist. I’ve walked together with people through so many aspects of their lives and been blessed to mostly help. I’ve been a highly recognisd profession and spoken at national and international conferences and been published locally, nationally and internationally. It’s been great to do these journeys with the presence of a loyal dog and cat, even now Gilbert blind goes everywhere with me, my therapy dog and so uplifting to patients and friends.  

5. Ive played games and sports and gone to great concerts and played guitar and sung alone and in groups and in choirs. I’ve dance and taught dancing. I’ve acted. I’ve fought and done martial arts. I’ve been very active and very much driven to be the best I can be, competing mostly with myself and rarely with others.  

I have had a truly blessed life and wonderful family, friends, teachers and pets.  If I was a better person more kind and more joyful I’d have got more out of this gift of a life. I’m still feeling like I’ve been given a jet plane and I’ve been mostly taxi ing it about the tarmac. I look forward to really flying. Astroprojection. Out of body and levitation are minor ‘tastes’ of understanding ‘gravity’ and going beyond it. I love it explained in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  “Anyone can walk on air but they mustn’t think about doing it’.  As the Bible says ‘if you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move a mountain’. I do want to increase my faith.  I am of too little faith. I’m right now studying Doubting Thomas.  It’s a good start to my next stage of growth personally and spiritually

Thank you God. 

17 yo and Shame, Gays, So so Gay, spirituality, psychoanalysis and meditation.

Later there were years of celibacy cycling back to promiscuity.  It was like I could turn it off and then if I smiled young girls came and threw themselves at me. I’d find women in my bed when I came home. I’d be blamed for being charming.I was accused of seducing women. I was told I was irrisistable.  I spent years in therapy.  I didn’t masturbate. I sat cross legged for hours. I prayed. I joined with a Benedictine for meditation.  It was always like something out of Spock.  I’d mind meld with holy men and holy women. We’d watch sun rises and sun sets. Alone together in friendship.

Breathe in breathe out.

 Om mani padme sum.  

I am He. I am He. Blessed Spirit I am He. No birth ,no death ,caste have I, father mother have I none, I am He. I am he. »

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The psychoanalysis was different. I spoke with Dr. White, the Christian psychiatrist and we talked over 6 months when he was my mentor. 

« I didn’t find it helped much. My colleague found it exciting. But then there’s always something exciting in confessional for the listener. A kind of voyeurism.  But counselors like this. With little training. Hearing people speak of their inner secrets.  But I didn’t have any secrecy’s. I share everything with Jesus. I have a wife and church and pastor and Christian friends.  We talk openly among one another. We really are a community of God. I know people talk of that. But I found it.  I’d recommend you do too. I’ve heard you talk about your church and you seem to accept a kind of anemic Christianity.  There’s much more.  Not for all but for some. I guess that’s why psychoanalysis didn’t amount to much for me.  I still think he got more out of it. But then we were more interested in technique back then. »

At times the shame was overwhelming. Shame separates one from others, from God.  They say shame means ‘you’re no good’ but that guilt is’ I did something that was no good.’  It’s really nit picking. In the tribe hundreds of thousands of years ago you did something wrong and you were told it was wrong. Any deviation from what was done was wrong. People lived by repetition of right behaviour. Don’t eat the red plant. Eat the green one.  

I loved reading « The World Until Yesterday; What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies. » by Jared Diamond. His first book Guns, Germ’s and Steel had been such a watershed book for me helping me understand the Polynesian people I was working with at the time.  Traditional Societies weren’t the myth of Hollywood and liberal politicians.  The Horror. The Horror. That famous line from Joseph’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness would come to mind. Everyone and everything was taboo.  The stranger was shunned and killed because that’s how people survived, safely, in the familiar.  

« Freud was afraid of the unconscious.  I thought it a much more reliable and trustworthy thing.  When I fell my body would automatically attempt to save me. Freud was an intellectual in that rationalist tradition that lead to so many hundreds of thousands of men killing themselves in trench warfare  WW1. «  

I was in Phoenix at an Ericksonian Foundation conference for the second time. I was learning hypnosis from the man who did hypnosis for heart and lung surgery. 

« Some people are allergic to anaesthetics. That’s when I come in.  In the old days everyone had surgery and was just held down by their friends and family.  Now they call me. I induce a trance. It’s often days of training and preparation. Then the person is distracted really. That’s what so much of hypnosis is, distraction.  They’re focussed here and the pain is over there. It works extremely well for acute surgery, brief periods. The dentists have caught on and like it. Of course locals and blocks work just as well. There’s the control factor to. The more you use drugs and procedures the more you rely on power.  Erickson liked to let things grow, trusting the process. Describing how plants didn’t need to be told. He believed that life was an inherent pattern in a person.  He thought Freud was afraid of the unconscious.  He didn’t like children much either.  I like children.  There’s that feminine and masculine aspect of nature. Jung talked of this, anima and animus.  We all begin as female and some of us transform into men biologically. »

I’d love reading Jung and how he saw Freud as frightened of the unconscious and needing control. Jung was more interested in the mapping the unconscious.  Freud was satisfied with his seeing that there was the Superego, Ego and Id. Later Erik Erickson, not Milton, would call these the Parent, Adult and Child.  Jung expanded this map as it were to the Shadow and Face. Then the animus (masculine) and anima (feminine).  He’d go on to study the archetypes and the « collective unconscious » those spiritual moments of ‘synchronicity’ and that sense of wonder.  HE was the son of a minister and his psychology spanned the whole of the myth and theology of the Europe of his day.  Freud by contrast seemed to be presenting an idea of the universe straight out of the Jewish history, limited to that, but with God removed.  They both were so interested in science and all the learning of the day.  Freud would write about anthropology.

Ivan Illich, the great French philosopher would write a book called Gender where he’d trace the domains of dominance by male or female of all aspects of life to the gender designation given them in language.  Le Auto meant that the ‘man’ had principal responsibility for this machine but ‘la maison’ designated this as principally the ‘mother or wife’s domain’

So much of the richness of existence and the sacred was lost to the bulldozing stupidity of Cultural Marxism, that Frankfurt school of intellectual nonsense that reduced everything to binary.  Marxism could be summed up as ‘rich and poor’, ‘bourgeoisie and proletariat’ and the rich oppress the poor. The exact same reasoning of the paranoid schizophrenic. There’s ‘them and me’ and I’m their ‘victim’. A very effective revolutionary design that served as the basis of aetheist war and murder of hundreds of millions of men women and children in a mere hundred years or more. No other religion had such a killing history.  Yet sadly Jews especially and all others refuse to let go of one of their own. As if Jewish intellectuals are a Navy Seal platoon of the mind that must keep bringing their fallen colleague back.

My famous colleague, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz would say with disdain, « Feminism is one of the maggots crawling of the dead body of Marx and Freud. »  

« A little girls religion, » she’d say. She was friends of Gloria Steinem and said her personal life was a train wreck.  « So many of the academics write and sound good until you know them up close. ». 

I’d meet the woman who lived beside my favourite gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson.  

« He kept peacocks. Try sleeping when your neighbour has these bloody peacocks that wake at dawn and make all manner of racket. He’d be passed out after shooting his guns off in the early morning. The peacocks would shit everywhere. You know goose shit but peacock’s are a whole lot bigger. So the shits that’s much more.  Worst neighbour I ever had. All his neighbours hated him. Mostly the peacocks and the gun noinse in the middle of the night.  Otherwise he was fine. The peacocks were impossible. »

I cycle back to that night. Over and over again. Trauma does that. This is trauma.  Betrayal for sure.  Sexual so more subtle and worse in some ways than the blatant loss of a limb.  Sexual matters are like worms that burrow under the skin.  I suppose the loss of the limb is worse but the shame may be less. It’s hard to compare. I’ve not lost a limb but I have experienced what would be called rape. I agreed at first then changed my mind only to be held down and penetrated. A rapist might get off on the technicality. I’ve heard a lot of men describe that as ‘normal’. 

Indeed the sophisticated sexual older women of my youth would say ‘no’ as I penetrated them and this ‘pseudo rape’ fantasy loomed large. 

I stopped and she said,  ‘don’t stop. Don’t stop’....

« But you said’ no’ . 

« Ignore me’. »

« Just continue. Pound me. Pound me. I want you to fuck me. »   

«  But you said ‘no’. »  

« I didn’t mean it. ..  Do you want a discussion or do you want to get fucked. »

 I wanted  to fuck but I almost couldn’t because she’d said ‘get fucked’ . I found myself thinking about syntax and construction. Was she fucking me or I was I fucking her?

She was a few years older and had come on to me inviting me into the wealth and elegance she had. She was certainly more established.  She told me this was just sex. She didn’t want a relationship but wanted to fuck. Then she’d said ‘no’ and ‘yes’.  I didn’t go back after a while.  She was confusing. I was young and sex was always available but in bursts with dry periods in between.  Seasonal. With flurries. Women always told me they found me attractive.  They only got angry when I refused them or left. Then they’d be venomous. I loved Zorba the Greek. The « complete catastrophe’ he called it. « Never say no to a woman. »

But I was wondering if I was gay.  I had been that night. I’d had no food. I was hungry.  Never go out hungry if you can avoid it. I was without transportation. Boys don’t hear always have money to get a taxi home.The guys in the band had the car. They weren’t leaving. They were conspiring.  There was champagne and caviar. An exotic spread in an elegant penthouse. I loved the warmth and ambience. All the older guys. I was the youngest.  I was a poet.  I believed in diversity and learning. I didn’t want to. I said no over and over again. 

« I like girls’.  I don’t want to. I’ve never been interested. ». 

« Okay, but just come. You don’t have to do anything. He just said he liked young boys and would make the record if we brought young boys. He didn’t say you’d have to fuck. We said, we’d see. »

That was the conversation in the car. When Lonny took the gun from the glove compartment and slipped it into his pants. Meaningfully.  Manly. He did that when we went to a party. Part of his schtick. Having the pistol and showing us he had the pistol.  

We went up the elevator.  

There were others there. Mostly the old guy though. HE was very attentive. « More champagne’. « Another jay ».  

I drank and smoked.  And watched the movie he put on.

It was everything I’d never seen. I sat on the couch completely stoned.  Everyone said how powerful the dope was. Really good stuff. And the wine was so sweet. Bubbles. Went to my head.  And I saw there watching gorgeous men and naked women and orgies of men and women then the pictures would change to just women, all so beautiful, all mingling like a kaleidoscope of Kama sutra, then just men, and animals and children and I just sat and watched. Stoned. And frozen.  I was paralyzed and My brain a wet noodle.  I felt so good.

I looked down at my lap.  The old guy was down on his knees between my thighs was sucking my cock. I don’t remember him unzipping my fly. I don’t remember how long he’d been sucking my cock. All the band and the other men were standing by watch, sipping drinks, tasting jouer douerves. It felt  good then. He was taking my hand and walking me to the bed room. I was watching this happen to me.

He gave me a Playboy and I stared at a centre fold as he undressed us. Then we were naked and his hands were all over me as were his lips. Then he guided me into him but I kept going soft. 

« Look at the Playboy » he’d say  and I’d look at the Playboy centrefold on the pillow by his head. I’d stay hard then and finish.  He’d clean me up and dress me.  Then before I left I’d watch Lonny pulling out a contract and getting his signature. Lonny had been watching too. I thought that creepy.   My ‘friend’ was laughing and smiling.

« You took one for the team. Good on you. » He said, like we were in school and I’d held up the end. 

« I  wasn’t going to do it. I never could but you did. » he said and I hated him.  I knew I hated him. T.s. Elliott.s Hollow Men.

A while later an older friend at the university invited me to a faculty party her professor was throwing. I was the youngest there too.  Just out of high school. My friend was from Vincent Massey a year or two ahead of me and now studying poli sci and English.  

There were all these papers and every where bottles of wine.  A guy came in with two green garbage bags of marijuana and dumped them on newspapers  laid out in the centre of the room.  Rolling papers were thrown around.  My friend met another man and they began to kiss. I sat down with a glass of wine. She went up stairs with him .  A while later she came down. I was drinking more wine and just chain smoking dope. I was in heaven. Never had I seen so much dope.  I was l’église and everyone  was happy. I was drinking wine and smoking dope watching couples kiss then go up stairs. 

The professor had done it with students and his wife had done it with students. Old people, young people. Then she took my hand. It was so soft. Her face was so round and close. Her voice sounded miles away. The music was floating through the air like staffs. I was seeing it. I followed her  up the stairs. She showed me the babies in the crib in another the room. The professors and his wife’s. 

But then she took me into the extra bedroom. The bed was big and soft with huge mirrors on the ceilings and walls. I saw she had trouble getting my jeans off.  I couldn’t seem to help. I was in that drooling staring catatonic dope state. She’d walked out of her own clothes like they were designed for rapid exit.  She was naked before me stroking me and untangling my jeans from my stocking feet. She pushed me back onto the bed and straddled me.  I supposed I consented. I could say I was raped. No clothes so no deep pockets. No fowl. No thoughts like those in those days. Today a new game of rape history for profit. 

I hadn’t  hada volitional thought. I was like Garp. She was probably merciful. Practicing charity.  I was in the flow A silly dope grin on my face. My mind a loose noodle. My erection a mind of it’s own. The only place with blood I was all vegetable. She’d hardly mounted me when I came. Not quite premature ejaculation, at best a peri-mature. coming. She was upset. I was supposed to wait. But I wasn’t home. He had a mind of his home but she rolled her eyes at me. She brusquely dressed me like a child.  

She walked me quickly down the stairs and left me by my pile of marijuana and poured me another glass of wine, immediately taking the next  man upstairs. He looked as blotti as me. I rolled another joint, had another glass of wine and wonder if that had just happened.  There’d been so many going up and down the stairs before the night was through. I thought she was wonderful. I felt wonderful. I almost took off my clothes in the living room but somehow stopped myself that time. Taking off my clothes seemed to take up a lot of thought and time. Eventually she came for me and put my parka on. We went out in the cold. She never asked me out again. I know it wasn’t anything I said because I didn’t speak. 

I was passive. Passive was great. Over the years I’d move all over the passive active spectrum. I felt I had to be active. The more active the better.m Married  for years , years later ,I’d get kinks in my neck spending my life between her legs licking an eternity as she said that’s the only way she could orgasm. 

« I don’t orgasm with intercourse, » , ‘she said. She seemed to. Come to think of it she always had a contented smile on her face. After I divorced I suspected her of lying. She didn’t reciprocate. « Good girls don’t like that. » 

Reciprocation became a theme with money and sex when I was a marriage and sex therapist..

I would sit for hours and and years and listen to couples dicker ant trade. Then the courts would talk about money like they’d talked about sex. Everyone wanted to be served but no one wanted to serve.

« He just fucks me. Never once asked what I wanted. Just fucks me. I take care of myself. I never had an orgasm till my girlfriend introduced me to her vibrator.  Never had one with him even after. I just lay back. You know that mothers told their daughters to ‘lie back and think of England’. I don’t think of England but I just think of other things.

« So here’s the joke, doctor. «  a patient told me »What’s the difference between a mistress, a prostitute and a house wife.?’

« What? I humoured him. I was seeing so many men for sexual abuse. All these macho men, leaders in society, doctors, chiefs, colonels. Coaches. First it had been the residential schools Then it had been word of mouth. You should talk to Dr. Hay about that. The newspapers made it something men could talk about. I loved the psychologists who had begun the BC Society for Sexually Abused Men. I talked to them in early days met the doctor who’d been 20 years with a male lover and 20 years with a female lover. « I love the person not the  genitals’.he told me. 

« What? ».  He was laughing. Sexual jokes were manly.

« The prostitute says, are you finished yet. »

‘The mistress says ‘more, Cherie, more’

‘The housewife says ‘beige, I think I’ll paint the ceiling beige.’

He was one of hundreds of good men who married in good faith and their wives decided they didn’t want sex anymore. Not after the kids. A myriad of excuses. They were good church women. Upstanding citizens. Withholding bitches.  Cunning conniving insensitive takers.  Stupid cows. Controlling. There were a thousand words that had come down through the ages to describe the situation. Always she said, he said. But in the end if the man slept outside of the house then  he lost the house and he  children. The women came in too and told me of lovers who were gardeners and how they were having sex with the  father or brother or best friend.  All I heard especially when I worked with the country.  I was a psychiatrist and I flew from town to town and worked in a variety of cities and different countries. But every person was telling me a sexual story of horrible sadness.

« My other doctors didn’t ask if there was anything that was bothering me, My psychiatrist says he’s just there to give me pills. He didn’t discuss sex or marriage and especially didn’t want to hear about affairs.

« He brings home men from the office to use me. Says he likes to watch. »

« If I don’t sleep with the men he doesn’t sell another car. I like it really. They say women don’t like that sort of thing but I do. I’ve always had a healthy sexual appetite. I don’t think my husband could fulfill it alone . This works. He likes money more and I make him a lot of money. »

« He was my pimp and the father of my children. »

‘The judge told me about her love of sex and role play.’

« She was a Wiccan ,’ she said. She described the orgy with the other naked white witch women and the happy young man.  

« He was in his  twenties and we asked him if he’d help us in our ceremony. Nothing painful. No one would be hurt. There were six of us. That’s the number you know. We all had a go with him. He was a really healthy boy. »

« My husband doesn’t care what I do as long as he’s got his football games.’

« If married women had sex with their husbands there would be no prostitution. Almost all my customers are upstanding men who are married, bringing home the bacon and doing their part but married to these cold bitches who simply don’t care for them. I service them and they think of me like they think of the garbage man. I fulfill my role. The women here know what goes on .  They’re not stupid. A lot of women just see their husbands as dirty little boys they use. »

« I dont know if I’m gay, I told the psychiatrist. I’ve never looked at another man and been interested in him. I’ve never dreamt of sex with a man. I’ve sometimes thought back to that older guy and his friend who fuckd me.  It wasn’t pleasant. I was hungry. I wanted dope. It was only a couple of times. I never went back.  I met Nancy after that and one girl lead to another. I loved sex with women. I masturbated to images of sex with women. I wanted women . I loved women.  But they say if even you have one time with a man it’s just a matter of time.  You’re either / or. »

« Thats’ not true,’ he said.  He discussed the spectrum.  « You’re definitely heterosexual.  My gay patients never think of women. Some men switch like women. I ‘m seeing a woman now whose husband died after 35 years and three children. She has an older lady friend and they’ve become intimate. She doesn’t know what to make of it. But it’s easier for them because no one thinks of two older women living together. Not that a lot of them aren’t lesbian but that’s what they think of men living together. Especially young men. »

I thought a lot about this.  Everything was a default pattern to the sex I knew married.  Married sex in a loving relationship with a woman was unsurpassed in my experience. I’d known years and decades of it. The hierarchy rancher than binary. 

There are many reasons for breaking up. She lost interest in sex. I found that that was what did me in. She just stopped having sex. She might have been having an affair and she said she was always tired. She turned away. She said no. I was rejected another million times by women and now it was my wife. I kept thinking of that study that showed men had been told ‘no’ a thousand times to women being told ‘once’ and how rejection saddened men in the dating world but made women angry.  The psychologist out of California who did the sexual research said, « Feminism is dead. Women simply cannot shoulder the burden of sex that men do. So the species simply can’t perpetrate with women being in charge. They simply won’t take the risk of rejection and want everything their way in the bed room. »

« Did you hear the joke about the two girlfriends at the woman’s sexual palace,’ she said.

« No. »

Freud said jokes were veiled hostility but he wasn’t a very funny man and quite insecure according to his colleagues.  He did accept that humor was a as mature a ‘defence’ or ‘coping strategy’ as ‘altruism’ . His daughter, The brilliant child psychiatrist would go on to write about lines of development.  Some of the early group who worshipped Freud still speculated about what his developmental disorders were. 

« Sometimes the paranoids are right’, he’d say fleeing the Nazi’s. He’d get cancer from smoking his cigar. Horrible mouth and throat cancer. Surgery and pain. The later somatic psychiatrists would speak of Anger and Organ susceptibility.  Those were the years when breast feeding and bottles were an issue. Then there was Abraham who said depression was anger turned inward. The somatic doctors considered much of chronic illness repressed anger . That certainly jived with a lot of stress research.

« The women are dying of breast cancer because the men aren’t fondling them. The men are dying of prostate cancer because their wives aren’t havening sex with them. »  He and his wife were both psychologists and they taught ‘energy flow’.

The facts scientifically were that much of prostate cancer was the same as cervical cancer. Herpes Simplex II STD  virus and too many sexual partners. His argument though was for much more sex with just one partner. They were very much monogamomay proponents.

So many patients told me of their involvement with the Polyamory Society.  This was different from the ‘swinger set’.

By this time I’d seen dozens of transexual assisting them in their process getting tremendous support when I kept them going forward towards surgery and then getting tremendous backlash and stigmatisation when I pointed them the other way to the door.  There was so many politicals in medicine by then. Competing factions. The drug company celebrated the ‘influencer’ and ‘leaders’ who got the most drug sales. No clear association with correct diagnosis or the increasingly criticized ‘morbidity and mortality’ concepts.  The College bureaucrats suggested a paradigm more  like Walmart . 

« Doctors are the service personnel. ». « Remember the customer is always right.’ 

« Your job is to move product. » 

I was castigated when I wouldn’t agree with a child having a sex change. I was all for adults having freedom of choice, that modern technology gave us many options. Luddites continued to criticize everything but cherry picked the clean water and efficient transportation. I wore a dress then. I liked going to church in high heels with red painted nails. We were all part of a society where women dressed as men and men dressed as women and we went out for dinner.  I felt so vulnerable in heels, so unable to run. I couldn’t understand how women had ever allowed men to take away their right to carry a purse gun.  I wore this skirt and had these thin little panties and only thought about being available for sex with my butt pushed out by my heels. 

We talked about this. « « In my lumberjack shirt and jeans and boots I want to swing an axe and mount a woman....the clothes are so defining ».

« Ive said it for years women are transvestites in modern society and men are the ones who are restrained. The man’s suit jacket was developed by the British army as part of their uniform in the 18 hundreds. I’m dressed for daily war and you’re dressed for love making. It’s so unfair.’

We all laughed over dinner and talked of sex changes and hormones. Many of the wives were there.  We played games like seeing who won the fashion contest shopping at Thrift stores without spending more than  $20. I was a wreck.

« You have to come out, » he said. He was my priest and I shared with him my confusion and frustration. 

« What’s more coming out than wearing a dress, make up and high heels. »

« But you’re gay. « 

« I like women. »

‘But gay includes that. It’s us and them. They believe in this one heterosexual myth. Strictly binary. ». 

If that’s the definition then I’m gay but I don’t think that’s very scientific. Political, maybe but not at all scientific. I liked Dr. Bea’s work out of Berkeley. She has men who’d rather die than switch and the women who were the same and that opportunistic middle group which went with the flow. I’m there. I won’t die to be straight or gay. I remember my Christian friend liking that there were other men like him who’d die rather than let anything touch their behinds. What really angered him was when I told him that there were an equal percentage of gay men and gay women who felt the same towards heterosexuality.

« It’s sexual addiction. » he said.  What did God want? That seemed pretty straight forward when it came to procreation but the relational part of sex was not so clear. There was a very good evolutionary argument that sex was fun far before it was functional. Monkeys don’t associate sex with procreation and many not have figured that out till animal husbandry days. But men and women have been doing it since the beginning as well as looking for love in all the wrong places. But we tend to judge others who sin differently than ourselves. 

The monk Ispent time with rejected all attachment.  The Stoics did the same but my philosopher professor friend was an epicurean.  We debated the Greeks once again.

I thought my body didn’t care whose lips were on my penis, male or female, but my mind felt differently.

That’s when I considered all the men and women I’d seen at work who had been into  bestiality. That through another log into the fires of the long discussions of ethics, morality and psychiatry.  As primitive even barbaric cultures move into the scientific modern age almost yanked out of ancient centuries they are trying as hard to pull us back into the dark ages. It is alright to fuck a goat but only if the goat consents. 

« Doctors shouldn’t talk about sex with their patients especially male doctors with female patients. If they insist there may be a reason but it’s best then to refer the patient to the same sex doctor primarily someone who is trained only to deal with sex. It doesn’t matter that there is no such person. It doesn’t matter if the wait list are years. You just must act like a doctor. Nothing is real. You just act like you care. Like I act like I care. The  jaded didn’t know they were jaded, »

A speciality in sexual medicine might be a consideration. « But it’s better not to ask questions about sex. ». No one does anymore and the children are again sexually abused and the darkness descend because the elite don’t care. The kill by neglect, murder by covert aggression. And lies 

He was a pompous fool who brought in sharia trained people to teach the students the proper medical exams . He worked for pharmaceutical companies and governments who had been caught covering up corruption so thick that the stink reeked throughout the valley. He was impervious to change.  Superior in a way that made a human chuckle.  He knew nothing about psychiatry and even less about sex. The money laundering was all he cared about the billions and billions of dirty money and dirty people. He was such a disgusting dirty little boy. Leonard Cohen said he’d be the KY Jelly. 

« Women don’t lie about sex’ his colleague said with a straight face on another occasion. Her divorce from  another physician and her sexual perversity  was common knowledge. A train wreck but always wearing white cotton panties.  The look in her eyes was vacuous. 

« They recruited women who hated men and hated sex. Communists mostly. They have peculiar ideas about sex.  Honey pots and promiscuity.  Engles and Marx were against the family. They fooled around themselves. Like the UN committee on sexual equality chaired by the Saudi Muslims, with not a woman present , and they don’t see a problem with that. They called all of this ‘superego lacunae’ when i was doing analysis.’

I was at the World Congress of Psychiatry talking with the Head of Moscow Psychiatry.  I had painted my nails red.  Men and women psychoanalysts told me how much they liked the color. Bringing the painted nails to the centre of the conversation intrigued, hoping I’d share,  but I just said ‘thank you’ .We talked about what we thought the sexual proclivities were of the present leadership of men and women . 

« We always got together and talked of them as children. « Merkel’s still Stazi ».  « What’s with all the mommy’s boys ? «  « Macron «   

« I don’t know what to make of Trump. He loves women but does he like to get spanked in the bedroom like our British leaders.’ 

 We laughed and it was good to be home among adults away from the asylum of the government and the faculty where they ‘d hired all the perverts who covered up for them.

I’d feel the gay older guy took advantage of me. He certainly drugged me and had sex with me. Just like my female friend did. I didn’t put up much resistance with either of them once my body was in play. A bit like a dog humping furniture. Date rape might be the term today but back then everyone was ‘easy’.  We drank and did drugs and even guys ended up with guys and girls with girls. We joked that if you remembered the 60’s and 70’s you simply weren’t there.  The Kavanaugh public drama was such a lie.  False accusations now running 40%. The « me too » movement as much about Weinstein being Jewish as about his being an obvious pig.  

Ugly men got positions of power and women without money or power exchanged sex for power. It’s there in the Museum of Sex I visited in New York.  I went au femme and I went drab. We read the histories on the wall. The number of species who were ambivalent. The biological record and the record of cultural history. 

I remember defending the Little Sisters costly and painful long running legal battles over censorship. I’ve always been a libertarian, hated the communist dictatorships and other dictatorships. Loved freedom. I thought it wrong that some dirty little political biddy with no sex life of her own, culturally immature, would spend countless nights alone or with her select and special boy and girl friends, perhas her family, deciding what other adults could see. The arrogance. 

I  was  the Youth Representative to Parliament and gave a speech on freedom against communism. Now the slippery slope has begun with hate speech and Islamaphobia.  Homophobia was a lie , just the binary idea of the thing not that gays aren’t persecuted, and it just snowballed .Even antisemetism back fired. A whole new victim industry. The fall of society with half the population accountable while the other half are not and claim entitlement by aneient victimship. Years ago I wrote extensively about the war between the ‘whose up and whose down’ the « one upmanship’ competition of men and the ‘one downmanship competition of women. » male bullies and female bullies.

I have had sex with a woman hundreds of thousands of time and sex with a man a dozen perhaps.  I understood her dilemma when she told me that her lesbian friends were rejecting her saying she wasn’t a lesbian anymore because she hadn’t had a girlfriend in a couple of years. She told me how boring the lesbian commercial drive society had become with who slept with who and who had the youngest. And she just hadn’t found anyone she loved. Her last partner had died after a ten year romance. I remember the lovely lesbian nurses I adored who I worked up north with and had at my home when they came down to the city.  Now here was this patient. Not lesbian ‘enough’. 

The pendulum had swung from gay being illegal in 1968. I’d dressed in a hot mini skirt and made a pilgrimage to Stonewall one night to see the drag show. It was very conservative. I was more outlandish in my space age wig.  I’d had to put together a costume at one store for under a hundred, The American I had in cash.  The young black girl had had a hoot helping me dress for the occasion.  Faces of New York wanted to photograph me. How funny was that.

But then the shift occurred. The mixed result of the Aids epidemic. My San Franciscan Anglican priest friend told me he was at a religious conference as a speaker following his Baptish friend who’d just heard that thered’ been another earthquake in San Francisco.

‘He’d then gone on to blame this on the gays and insist that their sinful life style had caused their the earthquake like it caused their Aids.. »

Hearing this I thought of all the men I’d seen when I served in the aids epidemic who’d got their disease from tainted blood the BC government and Red Cross had given them. I thought too that Aids was a heterosexual disease in the rest of the world and mostly my patients got it sharing needles.  I thought of the babies. I’d gone to courses at the conservative Regent College and the Liberal Vancouver School of Theology specifically to study « how come bad things happen to good people’ . It was what Job, the least taught book of the Bible was about. 

«  I told  my friend that I thought his friends  description of the earthquake and disease science was pretty sketchy. »

He went on to tell me, « I’d called my parish because I’d been concerned and found out everyone was alright. But I simply don’t like this old blaming and shaming holier than thou theology. »

« When I got up right after him, I shared that I was really thankful for my learned friend’s analysis and observations and that I would go back to my parish in San Francisco and Check this out immediately because I’d just called to see if everyone was alright and found out the epicentre of the earthquake was in our convent  nunnery. You can be sure  I’ll be looking into finding out if all these women are really homosexual men fornicating and spreading Aids.  I thought they were really nice and kind chaste ladies and never knew. ‘ 

« The assembly of ministers and priests had collectively not been on the side of witch hunts and blame and shame but  laughed uproariously. Even my Baptistfriend acknowledged I had a point »

« So remember a decade or so ago when if you sucked one cock the heterosexuals kicked you out and the gays took you immediately. » I asked my authoritative gay friend.  He nodded.

« I’ve got this patient who thinks she’s not gay enough so I was wondering now that gay is very much « in » how many cocks does a person have to suck to be gay?’

« None, «  he said. 

« It’s where you shop. » 

Picard Creek Campground, Shame, Death, and Psychiatry

I like being in this campground.  I could have stayed at the wilderness site but didn’t. I experienced a degree of anxiety alone there which is unusual for me.  Here there are others three of whom I’ve spoken to and actually liked.  A shy European accented gentleman was interested in my new KTM 690 and gave me a hand unloading it.  My neighbour a jolly Abbotsford realtor asked if his running his Jeep to charge his batteries bothered me. Of course it didn’t. I got out my generator and did the same.
He had talked of his success in real estate, retiring to Mexico for a number of years only to return and again be successful.  “I’ve made heap loads of money,” he said.  The problem arises when they ask what I do.  I answer, “physician’.  If it were stopped stop there it would be fine.  But they go on to ask 'what specialty or interest?”  And I answer, ‘psychiatry and addictions’.  This time I said, “neuropsychiatry and addictions’.  Yesterday I’d been treating head injuries.  I believe I’m ashamed of being a psychiatrist.
I felt so proud and good doing surgery and later as a country gp.  When I think of psychiatry I think of abortion, adultery, sexual abuse, homosexuality, drug abuse, divorce, constant surviving corrupt administration, seeing the underbelly of the beast.  Psychiatry took my innocence, what little I had .  Now I’m nearing the end of my career and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much.  I thought I’d somehow know God and plumb the depths of human existence in some way, and I have.  It’s been a mostly thankless task as was promised. I remember that first interview, the psychiatrist wondering why I wanted to be one, as much asking me as asking himself what he was doing.
Psychologists amuse me. They seem so proud of themselves.  There’s a proximity to the sciences that bring confidence in the arts crowd.  Yet here I am feeling so different from my colleagues in the world of ‘real’ medicine.  It’s a matter of validity.
I think I saw my surgeon friend from Saipan in Chilliwack. I recognized him and shied away as I do from all I recognise but don’t know instantly. I fear they are a patient and that there will be an awkwardness.  When I was a gp patients were glad to see me but as a psychiatrist I bring up issues often forgotten and gladly left in the past. We dig up graves in my work, examine the bodies and bury them again. I’m a reminder of the grave robbing, the night time tasks.
The surgeon is a Christian. An artist. Adept with his hands and mind.  A wonderful wonderful man.  I so admired him but I was distracted, trying to get all the bits of a strict learning fast learning curve together and ‘miles to go before I sleep’.  We were in a grocery store Friday night. I believe he was with his wife but I did see him looking at me and I still hadn’t figured out who he was, until I’d paid and was leaving. Then it dawned on me.  A colleague.  I’ve known only a few well, avoiding them since I had sex with my psychiatry professor.  I love the Third Day song, “I carry the shame”.  For decades now I’ve straddled the chasm that time opened.  I left heterosexuality and became intersected then.  “He tried to breed you,” my friend crudely commented one night when I was sharing.  It was a wound but I’ve never known if it was a wound like the broken cup or the crack repaired the Japanese saints speak of.  I became binary then.  Double minded. Demon possessed.  Alt gender.
This surgeon operated on my anus.  Repaired the tears.  I was again a tight ass for years after till once again “I shared a bum’.  I was no longer drunk or stoned but anxious, afraid and so very very stressed.  There was comfort there.  I worried then about sex addiction. Would I do this again or was that just a test, the ‘hair of the dog’.  Most think of me as heterosexual, but that’s true of all of us who have been abuse, the ‘confused’ and what euphemistically are sometimes called the ‘curious’.
Was I merely a hedonist. Was this just seeking pleasure in all it’s form. The Apple core experience.  I’d left the alcohol and marijuana. I’d thought I might be trans.  I’ve thought so often about a sex change known it’s not so much about sex as identity. Like the Leonard Cohen song, "Lover, Lover, Lover, come back to me…..I want a new face.”  I want a new identity.
I pray to God to free me of the shame.
“Taking estrogen for me was like smoking marijuana. I lost the edge I’d had. I became more accepting, less driven.”  she said.
I wondered then if I missed smoking marijuana, that sense of ‘blatto’, the feeling of being female or receptive, yin rather than yang.  I used to smoke marijuana and play guitar or want to languish in sex for hours at a time.  Sober it was a more rushed affair.  I don’t ooze through life. The edges are sharp. Testosterone is ‘testy’.  It’s demanding.
“I never wanted to cheat on my partner till I started this testosterone,” he told me, “Now all I want to do is mount young girls."
I play with my nipples and wonder if the pleasant feeling I experience releases prolactin and increases my maternal instincts.  In a Brave (and frightening)  New World, men will breast feed children so their wives can manage abortion clinics.
I can hear a colleague, saying “Get over it. Get on with it.  Make a decision.  You’re either he or she.  Decide.”  He’s a little square box man. He’s lived safely in control and authority.  I see the terror in his eyes.  I frighten people with the breadth of possibility.
Psychological mindedness is the ability to tolerate the tension between opposites. I”ve stood in the middle of everything since psychoanalytical training, seeing ‘both sides now’ to quote Joni Mitchell. I envy the ‘solids’ , those ‘black and white’ , ‘concrete thinkers’,  Piaget’s ‘pre abstract’ set.  They’re in this world.  The boy with the most toys wins. They’re the chivalrous ones.  They care for their women and children and have certainty. Their seed is planted in good ground.
I’m the ‘other’. Alien.  Priest scientist.  My struggle is with me always and I limp away from the combat on a daily basis.  That’s why I like addictions. I understand the core debate.  St. Paul said it, “I do that which I don’t want to do and I don’t do that which I want to do."
The division between body and mind.  The man condition.  It’s not just sexual for me. It’s everything.  Split person.  I reflect on that anal intrusion.  I’ve not done that to a man though a woman asked for this. I’ve done what women asked and regretted it. They’ve taken houses and lives and played with me like I was Ken doll in their make believe world without a sense of shame or concern for consequence. I’ve been thrown away.  I feel they’re wired differently. I thought it was just one but I’m not sure any more.  Their love of children is a wholly different thing from their love of partner.  I called them ‘babe’ and they liked it but I wasn’t their baby. I was mostly a tool to that end.  A stepping stone.  But the abortion lingers.
So much death.  At the end it’s the death that remains. The parts are linked in various ways. We make a story. A narrative.  We say A lead to B.  The abortion did this or the adultery did that or the lie lead there.  The shame is the conscience.  So many lack that level of morality.  What feels good, do it.  The opportunities are lacking for those living ‘lives of quiet desperation’ but I became unhinged from the pack early. Maybe that was the effect of drugs, or leaving home or being expelled from school or failing. The cost of difference. Being a genius. Being an adventurer and explorer.  I dared to be different and it lead to psychiatry.
I loved surgery.  It’s a thing out there. Like the motorcycle this weekend.  I’m not the machine. The machine is something I manipulate. In surgery I was not the body or the knife but removed, separate. But in psychiatry I’ve joined with the patient.  The psychopharmacologists are afraid. They throw little coloured pills at the disease. But I’m a psychotherapist. I wanted to heal with relationship. I wanted to change the course of the person’s life through psychotherapy. The pills were a tool in that process, not the thing. I truly ‘walked a mile in their footsteps’, entered their ‘nightmares’ and laughed consoled, convinced them that life was worth living.  I’ve stood alone on the edge of the abyss so it was nothing to stand with them and admire the view.  Without that insanity I couldn’t really help the insane.  I could put a band aid on it but I wanted to free them. Not of the human condition but of the fear.  I joined them in that point of fear and anger.
My sutures were laughter often.  Black humor.  Whatever works.  Whatever gets us to walk away from the edge.  Back to the hewing of wood and carrying of water. There’s a death waiting all of us. Why rush it. Slow down.  Smell the roses.  I entertained my patients and they came back for the next installment. Eventually they lived with me and then moved on to live independently again.  Broken minds so little different from broken minds. I was glad to treat them both
I guess I wanted your approval God. I know I have your love.  But would you validate me.  I think that having children does that for people, maybe not women as much as men. It gives purpose.  It gives belonging. Even my dog Gilbert joins me with life. I would not suicide today because he needs me. A relationship with a plant can bring life.  So much of it is getting out of self.  Egocentric. Narcisism.  I call the drug addiction mental masturbation. Isolation rather than participation.  Rejection of the community. Rejection of the government. Rejection of fellow man. My patients play with fentanyl like a child playing with a very sharp knife.  I see cutters too. They isolate the artery on their wrist and wonder in the blood.  The demolition man blew up things.  The sadomasochist was fine hurting himself and then began hurting her.
I like the blue jays in the wiley spruce tree before me. The tree stands close to the rushing river.  A massive upheaval of rock and soil forms the mountainous hill beyond.
God man.  That’s what we are.  Our minds capable of any range of fantasy but our bodies limited in space.  There are consequences of decisions. They are outcomes to be considered. My mother would have wanted me to marry the girl in the church and had some babies as she and Dad had done.  Like Cat Steven’s long, “settle down, get a job’.  I wish that I was that way inclined. I tried marriage and I tried to have a job and now I’m nearing an end. Alone in this space.  With my blind dog sleeping beside me, at this campsite. I liked the name Picard.  Captain Picard of Star Trek inspired me. “To go where no man has gone before.”  And to confront the Borg.  Communism and Democracy.  So often it’s played as ‘communism and capitalism’ but really it’s ‘communism and democracy’ But the naming of the thing was what Adam did with God.  In the garden.
We name things disease and disorder.  Those in control cut the bad things out.  They’ve made a clear choice. In administration the conquerors are surgeons, they destroy the cancerous rebels to make their revolt work.  Control. Dominance.
When he mounted me something was crushed within. Seduced he’d say.  But then he was victim of terror. Afraid of the night.  I walk in day and night. The moon was full and the camp so quiet last night when I woke and decided to let my blind dog walk a bit.  He doesn’t know what time of day it is.  We  both stumbled about in the dark.  I had a flashlight I could use. I’d put a light on the back of his harness so I could find him.  I called and he came but big boulders and bushes got between us.  Returning to the camp I carried him.  He’d had enough and was glad to go back to sleep. As was I.  To sleep.  But to dream is the rub.
God is the dreamer and I’m a co dreamer.  Each of us dreams.  I can leave it as a nightmare or embrace it as a moment of learning. If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger.  I’ll ride my new motorcycle today.  The KTM. Austrian. The Nazi’s invaded Austria first.  They were so similar and so many welcomed the Fuhrer.  There were those who didn’t.  That was nationalist socialism, but socialism all the same. Central authority. Control dominance.  Upper hand.  Goose steps then gulags. Fascism and communism two faces to the same totalitarianism.  One sidedness.
Now I surrender to God. God is my saviour. A light breeze washes my face. Later I’ll ride the motorcycle and it will be wind therapy.  A couple of times I nearly crashed yesterday.  Fishtailing in the sand. The uncertain road.  The speed necessary to get through a patch too much for the next.  The delicate challenge of balancing forces.
I am a psychiatrist.  I prefer being a physician.  But I am a psychiatrist.  And an addiction medicine specialist.  Hierarchies and economies.  Right now I’m a camper and one day I’ll be retired.  That’s what people ask me now, “Are you retired.”  And I don’t remember when the first time that question preceded, "What do you do?”  So often I’m not paying attention.
The blue stellar jays have flown away.  The crows remain.  I’m due for another coffee.  It’s morning and other campers are up.  Making breakfast preparing to carry on.  I like that I prefer the company of others.  At least here, at a distance, in our own space.  It’s taken a long time to come around here again.  The blue stellar jays have returned.