Travels with Amber: Spences Bridge

Morning. The sun has risen. It’s already warm on my face.  It’s above the mountain beyond the rushing Thompson.  The trains made some noise in the night but only once did I wake. I had sweet dreams and felt comfortable here in this camper, with my little dog sleeping through the night on the seats in the dining area. He’d be in bed with me as at home but I fear the jump down from the camper bed would not be good for his back.

I’ve cleaned my face enjoying the smell of dove soap. I’ve brushed my teeth with Colgate.  I thought of showering but really want a swim.  I like having a surplus of water too.  Later today.  

I wore the black nightie to bed with the sparkling word “sexy’ across the chest. I’ve had that for decades now. I’d wear it camping when I hunted alone in the mountains near Pemberton tenting.  The animus hunted. The anima lead back at camp.  Psychological mindedness, tolerating the tension of opposites.  I sometimes think that my masculinity has been ‘reaction formation’ and my femininity ‘identification with the aggressor’.  Yet I embrace both. I so enjoyed the strong young man and his pleasure but now older with less outlet for heavy lifting I’m rather enjoying more the feminine.   

I am a cross dresser.  My transexual psychiatrist friend joked when I lunched with her last month, “What’s the difference between a cross dresser and a transexual?  5 years. “ she said.  I’ve been cross dressing since I was an actor in my teens.  I played a school lead as a woman. It wasn’t an issue back then and I enjoyed those times.  I felt freeer, more creative and alive as only the young can be. Decades of being a doctor and a psychiatrist and an addiction medicine specialist I’ve grown weary of the social homogeneity, doctors dressing like lawyers and bankers.  I like my colleagues who wear shorts and hiking wear.  They are far beyond the white lab coat even.  Symbols of normalcy don’t seem as important.  

I’m technically bisexual by history. On my sad days I fear that when I was anally penetrated an bred the seeds of homosexuality were planted.  I was changed by trauma.  How melodramatic.  My cherry was bust and yet I’ve wallow in the self pity so many girls adopt to be one down and adopted. Of course it could be gentle.  A little lube would have gone a long way. But there are men in the gay community with a mean streak.  Feral.  In the war they were leaders in the SS.  Toxic masculinity describes them. I supposed the like raping boys and girls and the rape fantasies continue in society.  Shares of Grey and Sado masochism.  The most popular female fantasy is being ‘taken’ by a rich and powerful man.  

“Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?” He said.  

“I’d think about it”.  She replied.

“Would you have sex with me for a dollar?”

“What do you take me for?” She said.

“That’s already been decided. I”m just dickering for price”

I got the experience of being anally penetrated.  I said no so it’s technically raped. I was given my first blow job drunk and stoned.  I had sex with a man imagining a woman , so deluded by drugs and alcohol I couldn’t be accountable.  The social programming was broken.  I recoiled and returned to the tame world. I’d taken a walk on the wild side and didn’t return a billionaire but had a sore bum and a hell of a lot of shame.

Velvet Rage is the book I recommended to gay men.  We joked about men being ‘pussie’s’ and it wasn’t attractive.  Being gay was to be ostracized not like the tomboy or was she too a bit reviled.  It was definitely easier for her to return to her feminine role.  When a woman has a child all is forgiven.  So much of society is based on the need for children to man the armies of the world.  The demand only changed with industrialization. The birth control pill was created in 1952, the year of my birth.

The elite always have time and money for any indulgence.  The lower classes we’re too tired to be creative. The middle classes were upwardly mobile but cautious to retain there hard won status.  Homogeneity was the goal.  To fit in. Discretion was the rule.  Dr. Carl Jung differentiated the ‘self’ from the ‘persona’ or social self.  

I’ve done quite well till now.  I’ve served society and now with limited time left want to be free from  constraints.  There is little time for soon they’re just say ‘he’s demented. He’s psychotic’.  Difference is either mad or bad.  Wearing women’s clothes is my Klinger expression.  I don’t want to war no more.

Life is a journey, a grand one at this, This bit is a blip in the whole, a delightful embracing of the whole self.  Dr. Jung called these ‘bits’ the ‘Shadow’. Obviously there are darker aspects of life which were contained by ‘evolution’ but there’s also those other bits which are not so bad or wrong or demonic.  Society is evolving and we thankfully don’t need more children for war so heterosexuality and the trappings of the military are no longer the only game in town.  I like the expressions of the artist.  Besides I’m a sniper and called up as an old man I’d serve my community though really I’m a healer first and foremost. Killing is relatively easy by comparison.  The sheep dog is more advanced thatn the wolf in that regard .  I do imagine myself more a sheep dog, maybe even a bitch. 

Yuma, 0540,

Almost can’t believe it’s over. I’ve been 25 days at Best Western Mall Hotel, rm 272. I arrived on the 5th after 4 days driving. I arrived a day before planned so had to stay one night in another hotel.  

My sciatica after 4 days driving was still very painful.  It’s been with me the whole trip but with exercise and ibuprofen ,cyclobenzaprine, Robaxin, Acetominophen, ketorolac I’ve managed.  I was at 3 pill 4 times a day of various combinations till the last couple of weeks when I reduced pain meds to 2 to 3 a day with flexeril at night.  I found voltaren creams gave the greatest relief those nights I was woken by pain and couldn’t get back to sleep. The other surprise was the benefit of cold immersion therapy, the freezing water in the pool more a relief it seemed than the hot jacuzzi.

 

The whole time I was here and my trips into Mexico for feminizing medication I dressed au femme.  It just became clothing and rarely raised an eyebrow. I was a well dressed senior .  Period.  I didn’t wear lipstick or breast forms working.  But I did wear bikini’s too the pool and lie on the lawn chairs in bikinis.  The sun wasn’t as hot as I imagined. I worked 4 days a week, it being dark when I finished. When I do it again I’ll take 2 hour lunch to get some more sun tanning. The Rover dog sitting fell through because of the irresponsible sociopathic behaviour of the dog sitter who was truly so narcissistic I couldn’t trust Madigan with her. So I took him to Los Algodones with me and he did just fine.

I have gained a lot of insight into transgenderism, read many papers.  The free will determinism argument of genetics over choice is at variance with my scientific knowledge and experience.  I don’t accept the idea I was born in a different body because God made a mistake. If that were true I could argue equally and have I’m a different species.  For adults WYPATH says 16 as the earliest age for so called puberty blocker drugs.  16 is a reasonable age because it has been the age of consent for other sexual medicine consideration.  Surgical procedures can wait till 18 given that being a soldier that is the age of consent.

I’m still uncertain if my ‘black like me’ exploration is not obsessional.  I note that men and women prefer pants whereas I associated pants with work and like my painted nails and skirts as much a I liked sweats.  Wearing a bra daily just means that by the end of the day I want it off. I might well be a nudist trapped in clothes..  Today I’m as happy with sweats  at home watching tv.  An interesting development.  The outcome of the unnatural become natural. There’s no taboo. I can dress as I like so long as I’m respectable. 

It’s been a journey of acceptance,  Gender is a new country.  I like the inclusive smiles some women have shared.  I liked being told by the young mexican man that that week was Transgender week and he thought I looked great.  Nobody had a hostile response.  Most people mind their own business.  Really.  

I’ve had a wonderful adventure of a life with significant disappointments.   I suspect that when Trudeau goes I’ll be happy as a man.  The anti male atitudes of Canada have contributer to my MASH Klinger response to the inflow of communism and evil politically.  I suspect smoking marijuana affects hormones and my psychological being was affected by the marijuania use decades ago.  The bullying certainly has had it’s affect.  False allegations and lies.  Castrating government and females.  

Also aging. Which is better to be an old man or an old woman?  The key element for me is that I’m childless.

Death is foreseeable too.  I feel in limbo a lot.  

I’m looking forward to being on the road again.  I’m almost all packed. Just need to shower and put away the toiletries .  I’ve a couple of extra small bags and will need to have load and unload for another 3 nights after days of travelling west and north.  

I’ve prayed for guidance and help.  I ‘ve prayed for family and friends. Now I pray for a safe journey for Madigan and me.  Thank you St. Jude. Thank you Jesus.

Daylight Saving

I didn’t make it to church today.  I had thought I night wear a suit then I thought a jean skirt would be an idea.  I thought a tartan tie and leather overcoat or blue leggings with the mauve wool coat.  I was going in and out of a dream in my favourite place.  A peninsula with hunting in the woods above and sailboats in the harbour. I was in this Greek condo with beautiful people coming and going, I was looking for something. A treasure hunt in my own room,

I didn’t have anything planned today.  I’d hoped to go to church.  I wanted to meditate.  Be still and know that I am God.  Listening.  I thought of sex toys and bibles.  I miss the library days. Now I often get the same feeling outdoors typing up a journal.

I don’t think of mansions in the sky but more often brothels.  I’ve not been but I think of it.  My ascetism of younger years seems past glory, Today I wonder if this sojourn on life is just a planetary vacation from an energy existence.  It will all pass and I will be asked to write an essay on ‘what I did on my earth vacation,’

The people of the book talk about the ‘relationship with Jesus’.  I’m in touch. Speed dial communication. Hide and seek. I’m praying constantly or listening to the wee small voice. I love God.  

The idea of addiction and idolatry is thinking that this world is God.  Worldliness or asceticism. I’ve served for decades and devoted my life to others.  I’ve a very small window of debauchery and selfishness.  There’s no much time for  ‘partying’ when all you do is study, work and do call. Now I’m faced with a great vacation. I did a year bicycling a cross Europe, learning the limits of my education and Canadian propaganda. I studied geography, culture, literature and dance and love that year.  I came back to be a doctor.  A scholar and succeeded.  I had a ‘calling’.  A truly bright light spiritual awakening in a university chapel and that led to become a doctor. It started in a room in Oxford with a Quaker medical student and a daughter of a doctor.  I’d wanted to be a play wright. I was a dancer and an actor at the time. I became a monk. I meditated and prayed and chanted and studied.  I married again.  I didn’t want to be celibate and when marriage became such I moved on. That was the months of smoking dope. There’d been weeks of hashish in Morocco and drinking Guinness in London.

Then years of coffee and study and call and occasional weekends of drunken parties Christmas and Summer canoeing and work hard and play hard and a kind of adolescent dating between marriages.  More years of hard work and wine and pot. It’s legal now.  We thought we were bad for our tokes back then,  

“You’ve never drunk more wine than normal people do,’ the psychiatrists I spoke to told me.  

‘Your wife’s love of cocaine is a concern but smoking pot and drinking wine isn’t as big a concern as you make it. It must be difficult dealing with her depression and mood swings and violence, suicidal homicidal rages,  How long do you go without sex? “

Many months. 

And I worked and meditated and prayed and then I was free.  The drunken psychotics pedophiles objected to being pointed out. The white man hated the white man who served defended the natives. The drunken drug doing colleagues objected to your leaving.  The privileged and wealthy joined the lying ex who had gone to treatment  but detoured back to drugs and alcohol.  The authorities backed the lying psychopaths yet again.  

No wonder you turned back to Jesus.  He too was killed by government and church,.  He was perfect.  A son of god. You were adopted.  Imperfect but good hearted. You’d never hurt any one except you refused to lie for the authorities or wife and you stood up to evil over and over again.  Now again you became a monk.  Prayer and meditation,  Congregation.  Forgiveness. Acceptance.  You have to quit smoking. It didn’t matter what you smoked tobacco or pot but you’d quit for 4 months only to start again on a binge drinking session. A bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes.  Leave them behind.  A year of sacrifice and abstinence.  The ex wife preferred drugs and alcohol and lies. You couldn’t go back. 

You sailed away.

Solo sailing the winter pacific through hurricanes.  

Tropical islands and Jesus.  Theology classes for a decade.  Masters of Theology on line.  More papers and books and the Hound of Heaven,  Seeking Jesus.  God within God will come again. Learning Hebrew. Israel. Pilgrimages.  Rome, Ethiopia.  Ireland,

Now to my surprise I’m older and the Black Like Me adventure of transgender seems a direction to go. I’d planned to sail the Atlantic but solo my boat is dauntingly large.  I’d consider 30 fooot but not 40 foot though I love it.  I have trouble moving along accepting that my back hurts and could I bring the sails down in a storm. Do I want to?

All the women I’ve known complained of how tough their lives were. Always complaining. Always depressed.  I understood the mothers. Such a burden it is for me to have a dog I know men and women who don’t even keep a plant so their lives revolve around their bodies, Narcisists who insist they are spiritual and all their money goes to them and their epicurean lives. I’d rather have a bubble bath than fix an engine in the high seas. I’d rather call a tow truck than fix my truck beside the road. I’m tired of all the heavy lifting and hard work,

I no longer seek the most difficult cases. I worked with those who no one else wanted to see. I served in the areas of greatest need. I worked in the most dangerous and surreal surrounding. I’ve so often managed without any resources.I remember her only wanting to be in the middle of the university safe zone surrounded by the best of the best. I was a scout way beyond the wire and she never understood the ‘need’. 

“It’s just a job’, the fat cat woman resistrar said having spent a life in medicine doing the ‘easry’ ‘light lifting’ jobs and now functiong in all arrogance and stupidity as an apparatchik.  I’ve never received the ‘back pay’ I’d be entitled to if it was just a job. It was a profession, a calling, an act of service.  I got paid enough too little but never more,  My now dead friend and I figured we’d never been paid minimum wage by the hours we devoted.

But now I’m questioning what to do to keep on going,

Hunting, fishing, sailing no longer are the avocational pursuits that balanced work. The travel, always pilgrimages, the study of theology, the practice of the spirituality of imperfection no longer move me,

I”ve paid my dues and then some,

What do I do now? 

I could have a new identity, Take hormones, get breasts, a face lift. I don’t need my penis or testicles.  I’m rejected as a DNA donor . The baby I could have had aborted, The women who had children preferred to have babies with the bad boys but want the safe and caring guys to take care of them and be their ‘friend’ in old age.  The world is increasingly populated by ‘bad boys’ children.  The girls of my feminist era had abortions and gave up the land and heritage to the Son of the Great Abortionsist Trudeau could invite the Muslim hoards with countless children and wives to take over the country while excluding the Catholics from South America who like bikinis and don’t want to kill homosexuals.

I’m bisexual. I love and loved girls but they became angry and blamed men for the acts of politicians and judges.  They told lies and I was among the ‘falsely accused’ , and the authorities angry at Christians or those who weren’t ‘unethical as they’ used the lies to attack.  I’ve been castrated by my government. I’m Klinger.  I’d rather wear a dress, identification with the aggressor or imitation, the sincerest form of flattery.

All over old men are attacked.  The old women fair better..  Better to be a Molly in a dictatorship.  If rape is inevitable better to lie back and enjoy it. I was sodomized by the government and the government protected the false accusers and sodomite rapists.  

I don’t want to struggle.  

I’m older and I’ve done my 40 days alone with God.  So many people think they know God but they don’t fast from this world like that. I’ve fasted from food for weeks and alcohol, cigarettes , marijuana , for decades. I went without sex for years and some of that in marriage.

What if this sojourn on earth is just an adventure,

Buddha went on about ‘reincarnaton’ and wanting to escape Maya. Why?  All life is suffering. Kierkegard,  Life is suffering unto death,  Namaste Badaste. We all die.  I do believe in reincarnation.  I continue my consciousness here or in heaven. Jews believed in reincarnation. Christians did to till Emperor Constantine at the Nicene Creed rejected the idea.

So I continue. I woke up today. This life goes on,  Life is better when I’m hopeful and positive.  The law of attraction does apply.

But if I fuck a stranger or a man will I attacked negativity.  Fucking spreads disease We’ve been collectively isolated from others. No touch, Covid. Avoid intimacy. APA says depression is all time high 3 x the rate of before the lockdowns, The Overdose and relapse death appalling,

Yet we persist in the 1950’s ‘Bad Bug, Magic Bullet” model of disease, the one I left for the multi factorial psychosomatic reality of psychiatry and immunology in the day. Where did we go wrong?

I can’t question anything or the authorities will hurt me. They have hurt me again and again for doing right and telling the truth,. They hurt me and shamed me and humiliated me and wasted my precious time with their mediocrity, a collection of drones who failed to study Nuremberg, the banality of evil. I would rather treat the stinking sick street person than listen to the inanity of hypocrites who are chosen for the fear and shallow loyalty.

I have no children ,They may take the jobs for fear. There is one who is scab labour and using the position to promote a divisive agenda.  

It’s all politics.

If this is a prison, it’s a pretty nice prison. I made great chilli yesterday. I have this dog friend. Like the cult classics a boy and his dog I’m well dressed, Netflix and prime. So many good movies. Great books though I’m tired of the similarities.  It’s all transparent. I grow weary of the narratives like the stupidity of politics and the illusion of change.

I was pinned by him as his cock tore open my anus. I was crying with pain. The shame came later. I bled from my anus for days.  The sperm must have been there too. This ‘hard man’ bred me.  I would only ask for a little time to day.  Maybe some lubricant. I’m no longer an anal virgin,  He took great pleasure in my pain and his hard cock ripping me apart as he slammed me down, holding me down, his weight and his strength controlling and dominating me till he released his seed in me and I was left damaged and bleeding, 

Years later I’d work in jails with psychopaths and sit in board rooms with men who ordered the knee capping of others, I have known enforcers and security who ‘were just doing their jobs’ and others who said “ I had to have him removed.  He was hurting my business.  I need money to put my children through university.’  So many people I’ve known say’ everyone lies’, “everyone cheats’.  “Everyone “.  ,No they don’t . Psychopaths and sociopaths do and we all have a bit of that,  But most people don’t know the real ones, They think their ‘ex’ was one because they don’t like their ex.  But you change your perspective on relavitive reality when the barrel of the gun is behind your ear or in your face.  

I just muddle on, I like walking the dog.  I like working, I know the pharmacy and diagnosis, I can be a cog in the machine,  I’m a team player on a good team offering help and solace. I’m like the parts guy at the service department.  I used to feel I needed to do everything in my power to get you well. I prayed all night, I read literature from around the world. I treated everyone as special, I gave the care to anyone only the prime minister gets here. Now I do as I’m told. I’ts ‘good enough’ and ‘better than so many’.  I’m okay. I’m no longer the best.  I’m past my shelf life.,  I wonder how long I can do this,  It’s not sustaining,  It pays the mortgage.  It’s ‘right livelihood’.  I’m still doing good in the world.  

I believe I’m still doing God’s will Thy will be done not my will.

It’s not much fun for me.  I miss the intimacy of sex. I miss the adventure of travel. I miss the challenge of the impossible dream. I’m grateful.  I’m okay. Tm blessed and looking back on my life it’s a miracle.  I’m still alive after the many deaths I faced and those who threatened me are no more.  I thanked Archangel Michael for his protection.  I feel I’ve been repeatedly avenged and I still do God’s work.

I imagined old age a pipe and wood jacket writing in a library, maybe teaching but not in a politically correct dictatorship with feminists waiting to hear a word that they can take to the thought police and play out their ‘save the world from men’ designs denying that all the greatest killers were supported and celebrated by a woman and they all had mothers. So suddenly Eva Brawn is a victim too, I’m so weary of the maggots crawling off the dead body of Marx.  

I almost thought to teach medicine in Ethiopia but I don’t know the language so I thought of anywhere they speak English and imagined I know a lot compared to most an how I’d like to share what I know of clinical psychiatry. I’d be that old man in Oxford but now it’s young women who demand those places and they don’t want old white men who are the enemy.

Like King Lear I’d talk of courts things

I fluctuate between hope and indifference. I imagine the Quebec judge who works wearing a gown and robed and eye shadow I like the General who fat like me enjoys wearing a bikini and doesn’t seen to care she doesn’t look anything but a rather plain old lady.  The transexuals who are old don’t look so different from the old ladies and we do about the same.  

I could talk to a psychiatrist again. The specialist in gender I saw said that my cross dressing wasn’t sexual but rather a way of dealing with anxiety. He ddin’t think I’d benefit fro a sex change and it’s obvious I prefer women when they don’t want to use me , abuse me or are insane or self serving.  They say in AA the Al Anon’s who don’t practice a program are crazier than the craziest ‘sober’ drunk who doesn’t practice a program.  ‘Be ware of them the psychiatrists always tell me,’ “You are their drug and they’re bring you down to their level.’

Isolation is addiction Participation is recovery. So many people surround themselves with their “mirrors’.  I’m alone and together.  

They cannot play when they are afraid There’s always manipulation and control and they lie to themselves.

I’m glad the ultrasound device has scared off the mouse who came in from the cold.  I’d thought to get a cat but the little blue light works so much better. I miss a cat. They inhabited this world and the other.  I love when the other touches.  

I didn’t go to church today. I walked the dog and he’s due for another round of his sniffing spots.  Probably should walk him again in the rain, breathing deep, thanking God for life.  Even the confusion.  

Friday Morning, day before Halloween

I woke early and decided to stay up.  6 am, 6 hours of sleep. I’d been unable to put down the book I was reading.  

Now I’m back to reading it, a Jasmine Frame detective novel. 

Halloween weekend. It’s the time of year for cross dressers and Samhein.  Our Christmas in a way.  Since Rocky Horror Picture Show I’ve been dressed in some form of women’s garb. Before that I’d worn diapers and witches costumes. Now I’m just thankful for a night when it’s perfectly acceptable for a bloke to wear a skirt.

I’ve worn my kilt and scottish regalia on other occasions but that’s military and masculine garb.

I like the soft fabrics and easy clothing of ladies wear. I remember as a child and young man I was very much into the dandy male wear. A dancer and actor in the making I’d loved wearing a new sports jacket and slacks. But after medicine and the white lab coats I was back to uniforms. Then as a consultant it was the return to a sportsjacks and slacks. I liked wearing ties. They were the one piece of male wardrope where one could express the whimsical and individual. I had a collection of wool ties and ties reflecting fine art. I loved my Rembrandt tie.  

Then one day, 20 or 30 years ago men’s clothing really did seem ‘au drab’.  I loved wearing women’s clothing and enjoying the make up like I was back in the theatre.  No doubt the dissociation associated with trauma and the added even worse trauma of the disclosure of trauma contributed. 

Halloween was the night. There were the ball nights, so called Drag Queen Balls. I did enjoy those. I even had my hair done up and nails for one occasion.  Friends didn’t recognise me till we met on these occasions and I whispered who I was.  It was so much fund to be incognito. 

I felt free and confidential dressed and made up while as a man I felt forever on guard.  I never did recover fully from the appalling trauma I experience decades back when all my civil rights were stripped and I was roundly abused by sociopaths in suits.  I’ve simply never felt safe in Canada since. We only lease our houses from the government and bureaucrats can imprison anyone.  I was released but the lies and the fowl play stayed like Hamlet.  Romeo and Juliet, the Death of a Saleman but my own fault for muy associations.  Out of the country I relax. Often I’ve taken holidays and lived out the fantasy of au femme in some foreign place where no one would recognise me. I always found Joni Mitchell’s song “Freeman in Paris”, playing in my head at those times. There was a lightness to my step. I thought too of Leonard Cohen’s song poem, Lover Lover and his line I want a new face. The sad part about betrayal is it is done by your friends.

Now I don’t care so much and for years I’ve just not thought anything of going out on occasion in a dress or skirt. I’ve enjoyed buying the alternatie clothing.  It’s all exciting and taboo. A whole journey which only others like you have shared. The humiliation and stigmatisation and judgemental attitudes of transphobic shop girls versus those other wonderful women who are simply so loving and helpful. I remember decades back getting the first breast forms and the pocket bras.  I loved the ladies who fitted me and helped me.  Those early days it was all so scarey and exhilerating.  

Of course I talked ad infinitum to pscyhiatrists, counsellors and pastors. I was even exorcised but it didn’t seem to take. There was that whole business of collecting clothes and purging but ultimately the cheap Scottish genes kicked in and I simply moved the women’s clothing to the locker only to bring it back months later.  Finally there was a separate locker or suitcase and on occasion I’d enjoy the repreive from the war footing.  I’d always had to protect and provide.  I’d always had to defend. Defending those who were injred and abused meant I was their ally and the very people and institutions who hurt them hurt me for even associating with them.  I fought bullies in school and at some point past middle age I realized thet it didn’t end.  I actually spent some years seeing a psychiatrist to discuss why I helped the needy and how best I could change to be more selfish like I ought to be. Being empathic helped my patients but certainly did not stand me well with the hierarchy. I’d actually identified and had removed senior doctors, nurses, hospital administrators and even a judge all who had been corrupt, sick but by their evil behaviour hurting others.  I”m thankful for those who had my back but I was usually alone in the fray and the system tooks days, months or years to right itself.  I still wonder what life would be like if I just didn’t care. I asked people not to kill people in front of me but they seemed to take greater glee in the act of killing and the act of doing it in front of me.  

I’ve been most suspicious of smooth operators.  The school yard bullies were stereotypical but the adult bullies looked like lawyers, mayle and female, ‘power suits’ and gentile manners, well groomed and well heeled.  A certain indifference.  I loved Arendt’s description of the Banality of Evil,.

Au femme I didn’t think of such things.  ‘Girls Just Want to Have “ fun was the song that ran through my mind. I tried to get along with everyone and didn’t object or care what people did outside of my contact with them.  It’s amazing but a girl can have coffee with Hitler and he can be very charming and it can be a fine night and that’s all it is.  Once you find out that the person you met briefly socially was a psychopaths then it’s on you to continue the relationship. I walked away but as a girl wasn’t engaged in work or service.  I was in the au femme mode on vacation. The clothing assisted me in the leaving behind of the white lab coat and the sports jacket that had been fashioned on the British Empire Officer’s military jacket.  

When I wore high heels and a white silk free flowing dress carrying a designer bag with only a few possessions, I don’t feel any desire to step forward and stop a fight or a rape or literally get involved with anyone else’s monkey’s and circus.  I had slip on heels on Davie one late night, possibly another Halloween, and was walking alone when a car with 4 jeering angry south asian man circled by me twice.  I was actually afraid.  They’d been beating up gay men and it was in the news and there I was looking like prey and wondering why women don’t carry purse guns, hat pins and wear sensible shoes. I was ill prepared and realized Feminists don’t want ‘women’s rights’ like the ‘women’s liberation' crowd I was part of.  Feminists just want to wear 4 inch heels and blame men for not protecting these little princesses.  I’d done my share as a man of protecting drunk and drug addicted ex’s with bad mouths from the consequences of their behaviour and frankly didn’t like that role. But we’d argued back then for women to have the right to purse guns and I taught women self defence.  Now here I was in these silly shoes knowing I’d at best take two of the four. Au drab I’d consider the odds not insurmoutable. I’d hospitalized three of 7 attackers once and had escaped many a hairy situation but here I was in nylons and fuck me shoes that were not even meant for walking. I was glad they left and later weeks later the police would catch them and I’d recognise them as the very same guys who followed me.  Perhaps at 6 feet tall broad shouldered and proud walk despite the coiffed hair and padded bra and flimsey dress I’d seemed to threatening to these low life low brow cowardly thugs. 

I’ve always missed the one on one cowboy fighting my friend Kirk and I engaged in as children. Later I’d do martial arts and even competed one on one in wrestling one year. I lost and wasn’t interested in belts but loved learning the skills and starting as a teen the oponents didn’t bow. They also carried knives, scars I remember painfully learning to avoid, and usually came with two or three on one.  It was only in my 20’s I began to be shot at, revolvers appearing out of nowhere and shots whizzing through the air from rifles.  I know that anyone who has faced guns has respect for them and those whose world is tv and games don’t.  I’m deeply disheartened that so many Canadian girls are so utterly ignorant of guns, and war and men.  Our military and police have done simply too good a job.  When I was in charge of the dangerously insane wards in jails and asylums I met the people that one one one scared me and I wished that it was a requirement of politicians especially liberal women to spend some time with these individuals so they could leave off their utopian fantasies and join us blokes in real world.

I envy the princess.  I wrote “I want to be a pricness for a day”.  I admire all the good mothers in my life and the great women I know. Transexual M-F go through an interesting phase when they begin to come out, often dressing age innappropriately or like hookers. The first is the appeal of the girl becoming a woman teen and trying out of different fashions, the too short skirt, the obviously not sensible shoe.  The longer one cross dresses and the older one becomes the more appropriate one is. It’s the teens thazt go through a range of styles and fashions till the settle on what works for them We do the same though with less time and less feed back.  It’s the secretiveness that surrounds us. 

Also the young transgendered aren’t dressing up for work but for social life so there’s an emphasis on the erotic. The difference between the celebrity and the whore is subtle and watching men frequently fail in achieving the right balance is a source of amusement.

I’ve not cared to ‘pass’.  I once read a delightful book called the ‘lazy cross dresser’ and realized that women have been cross dressing for a hundred years and most cultures don’t have the rigid differentiation that ours done. In the tropics I was content to wear a sarong or shorts and t shirt. It’s only in winter Canada that I ‘m even considering hose and undergarments.  

Halloween is a fun time. The Parisian and Italian Concubines and the Western Saloon girls and Burlesque all have a flavour of the 30’s flapper party. Mail order allowed all of us to order clothing fitting for home and since we were not going out it’s not surprising that the transgender crowd has robes and night gowns but not a pinafore in their wardrobe.  It’s only late in the game that cross dressers, transvestites and transexuals actually where gender distinct work clothing. My friend the Transexual Diesel Mechanic simply didn’t change from blue overalls to pink overalls. The overalls the girls working with him wear are blue like his and men and women have long hair and earring so for the trades its often only an issue of their choice of underwear and because they don’t want boobs caught in machinery everyone wears the equivalent of the sports bra or binder. No bullet bras in the journeymen and journeywoman world. 

The Transgender ‘clothing’ issue arises in the legal profession and the office where the female stil wears the skirt despite Hillary’s ‘pant suit’. Ironically high heels remained and make up and lipstick feminists refused to go Amish because theyt really didn’t want equality but rather wanted leverage. Their natural sexuality and appeal to counter the male muscle and brawn.  Hundred thousand years of natural selection.  A hundred years of modern society.  Freedom a very recent matter for the masses. The rich and powerful were always wearing women’s knickers one days armour and swords the next.  What mattered was power.  Conformity was the means to survive for little guy. 

The oldest law is the Chinese law of the fish: There are big fish and little fish.Little fish must be fast and numerous.  Parents wanted children of the middle and lower classes to not ‘stick’ out’.  The tall poppy synderome of the Australian world is the one that got chopped off. The elitte by contrast could in their private world do wahtever. As one poor black man said , ‘social workers and police are in every aspect of our lives. We live on the streets or among others.’ Only the rich can live alone in mansions with no one monitoriing their coming and goin.

In Communist countries everyone is an informer. Wealth and power give those that can afford it the Epstein Island experience or as novelist Patterson wrote, the cannibal dinner party experience. The jaded crave new sensation.

Halloween and All Saints Day and Samhein are all about transpersonal reality. This world and these passing cultural fads and fashions are nothing to the reality of life and death and questions of heaven and hell and purgatory.  We mock convention.

I wear a dress. I have no desire to be a zombie or dress as the dead. I’ve seen far too much death. But I’ve not known enough of the world of Jane Eyre and the Bronte Sisters. That DH Lawrence and Somerset Maugham world placed before the responsibilities of adult hood where families are formed and people live in the fish bowl created by their children who are questioned by teachers and bear tales of the house to neighbours and all.  I didn’t have children. I wasn’t policed. I had a dog who didn’t care if I wore leggings or pants as long as we went for interesting walks and he was well fed and I threw the ball. I can throw ball in skirt and heels or jeans.  My dog might have told the other dogs I was a bit queer but he didn’t tell the authorities.

My friends and family have not really understood but have been tolerant.  I’m surrounded by people who like the male me which I’m thankful for. I’ve served well but at the cost of leisure and self.  Dressed in a skirt I am still capable of writing. But I was driving by an accident au femme and stopped. I stood and observed that those already there were doing a reasonable job. I’ve saved so many lives at accidents and stepped in a took charge. But I actually thought I didn’t want to be exposed or dirty my clothes or get involved so only stood back observing. If anyone had done something wrong I’d have stepped in but au femme I was content to stand on the sideline. I’m also old and learning to let the young muddle along. After a while I left and seeing ambulances with flashing lights, adrenaline and testosterone coursing through the veins of the young.  I pulled out and drove on, glad not to be involved except peripherally.  

I don’t want to be centre stage. Most of my life I’ve enoyed the role of the assistant to the king. I used to be my father and my brother’s assistant and even my mother’s assistant and in surgery was sought after as a surgical assistant. I have definitely been in charge.I’m a solo sailor and a captain but I much prefer the militia to the offiial troups, the role of scout to the role of colonel, or simply being one of the crowd. I have been president and vice president but now am thankful to be able to serve. I’ve always liked duty and service and doubt that is affected by my sense of twin spirittedness or clothing.

Halloween is a time to celebrate the dark passenger or the breadth of the Jungian anima/animus/personna and shadow.  It’s a full moon too.  And an American election year. And the unspoken war with Communist Chiina continues while our PM appears more and more stoned but claims now that he’s ill. Everyone is playing the pity card. I don’t wish to. I like Gladwell’s writing on outliers. I’ve been castigated for intelligence, wealth, poverty, clothing, lack of clothing, sexuality, etc.  Judgementalness is a major coping strategy for many. I love the Catholic list of sins and how those with gluttony and sloth condenm those with lust and the avarice condemn all. I’m trying very hard to learn the Franciscan idea of acceptance, of myself and others. 

Halloween Hallow’s Eve.  I’m fay too. Its definitely the time of the year to be fay. 

 

 

Autumn 2020

I can feel the fall. I turned on the heater last week. It kicks on in the night. The mornings are chill.  I’m still just wearing shirts walking Gilbert but have considered a sweater.  I took a picture yesterday of leaves changing colour. Reds and golds and yellows. It’s so pretty this time of the year. I look forward to bow hunting.  A time to walk in the woods or sit meditating.  Sometimes I shoot something but mostly I just enjoy camping.  

Eric fixed the water leak yesterday so the camper is ready on the truck in town.  A quicker get away without the need to stop except at the gun storage locker.  I remembered to put out the SiOnyx to take night sky pictures.  I’ll have my Nikon P1000 for birds.  There was actually a time when I just hiked with a camera but then for decades I hunted and enjoyed wild cuisine.  I’d love to have a freezer full of venison this year and make my fabulous spicy nutritious venison stews ,curries and chilli’s. It’s equally possible I’ll just enjoy drinking coffee and reading in the camper. That’s mostly what happened fishing. No fish but a great time was had by all.

I’d actually found cammo leggings and a light fall green hunting suit this summer.   My hiking boots are still good.  My other hunting gear I’ve had for a decade or more but those jackets and cammo pants have been too heavy for the usually sunny hot weather in early fall.  I used to hunt moose in winter but I’ve generally stopped hunting by October because I’ve had a life time of snow and cold and sliding trucks. I’ve become much more cautious and careful these last few years.  I just don’t care for any more major equipment costs or injuries.  I have enough traumatic  memories of adventures.  

The best one was being washed down the raging river in the Broncho II and Shinto jumping through the window to swim to shore to save himself. I was thankful I got caught up in a fallen tree across the river. I was able to get ashore and use the winch to haul the sinking vehicle ashore.  Shinto looked a bit guilty having left me to float down the river.  So much for camping on an island only to have the river flooding and washing out the  road  the torrential night rains. I headed out to hunt predawn and in the dark didn’t see how much higher and faster the river had become. Another good reason to wait for the light to go hunting now. When I was young, thanks to the guidance of my old friend Bill Mewhort, I was up at 4 am and positioned in the woods before dawn.  I’m lucky to be out at 8 or 9 now.  Getting up early doesn’t seem to work for me. Too many years on call.  

I’m always excited by the fall.  Probably my favourite season.  I loved winter when I cross country and downhill skied but I stopped doing that mostly a decade back. I haven’t even snowshoed in that long. I must have been another person when I made igloos and quinces and winter camped. Years of fly in doctoring year round in the north has sated my appetite for frozen engines, parka’s and cold.  I really feel I’ve not had enough time in the tropics  I often reflect fondly of the years of island living, the heat, the friendly people, and evening breezes.

I dreamed of sailing again. I’m often dreaming of sailing on the SV Giri.  My nephews talk about it.  Maybe next summer, after Covid.  The camper and truck are my land boat.  I do love them.  Nothing beats being able to pull off the road and climb into a cabin on wheels.  When I was on the sailboat there never was any ‘pulling over’. Anchoring was great but it could only occur in coastal waters.  Offshore I always had to keep watch at sea.  

I’m enjoying working from home.  The video conferencing is better than phone alone. I find the medium exhausting. It’s okay for pharmaceutical medicine but there are too few cues for psychotherapy. It works with major listening and concentration  but I do appreciate my colleague who says she’s considering retiring because it’s an awful way to practice medicine.  I hate the ESL issues on the phone. I’m exhausted after a phone call trying to understand what a person is saying about the nuances of emotional and mental health with their lack of the language and translators who are often equally challenged.  I remember when I started how selective and exclusive I was in choosing people for my psychotherapy practice with it’s limits and goals and weekly visits. Now I may see someone every three to six months.  It is a supreme challenge.  

I left my methadone practice only because of the greater risk, inability to see patients, the phone not working so well in an often duplicitous practice and the pharmacies and government issues with outdated triplicate prescriptions. 

 I’ve enjoyed adapting to whatever the situation is but know that any day we will have to be perfect again with the armies of critics demanding the impossible while they themselves stay as far from the front lines and real reality as humanly possible. I was already disappointed in the poverty of competence and intelligence in some of the leadership but Covid has really brought out the best in some and showed how sick others are. A real mixed bag response.  It’s still so confusing. Thankfully UBC and BC with our NDP government hasn’t been as rotten as Canada has been by comparison. Ottawa is a cesspool of misinformation, corruption and conflicts of interests. 

So many people out of work and the country being bankrupted by mismanagement or downright malice, I’m aware I am a ‘lucky’ one to have work but then I’ve always worked and this whole Covid matter has just meant more and harder work and so many others are rewarded whereas I’ve not seen any ‘reward’ in this matter. I have a go to place of envy and self pity after working so long and sharing as a physician in the stigmatization of my mentally ill patients. Working from home is better without the commute and I simply don’t feel safe indoors with others so I’m glad for that. But the work is harder in ways and people are a lot sicker.  Again I’ve had to call the police to go to a patients house.  So much domestic dispute and relapses and financial concerns and isolation. I’m so saddened to hear of the old dying and family not able to see them in the time before.  

Gilbert’s walks continue to be a high spot. Prayer too.  God within. God will come again. I would know you more surely Jesus.  Holy Spirit come. 

My church has reinstated outdoor mass with success and I expect I’ll one day go again though I’ve been disappointed in the overall church’s response collectively to this crisis. More social work and less spirituality.  It was in the plague that Julien said “All shall be well”.  Now I’ve not heard anything so spiritually true.  Mostly platitudes and politics.  But that may as well be my own selection bias. I’ve sought meaning in this time and the church has been mostly uncertain and afraid.  Riots in the streets with the church joining abortionsists and Marxist aetheists  So few of the church leaders have held true and not been swayed by the political fashion of the month. Poland has had some moments.  But the lights have gone out in Hong Kong.  Where is the C. S. Lewis that arose when the Nazi socialists over took Europe. The Pope is a disappointment and the child sex trade issue is not over. It’s tentacles reach throughout society though Hollywood is disturbingly silent as more are connected to Epstein.  

I’m aware each day of my own deficits and need for more character. I am more feminized in ways but wonder if the highest isn’t transcendent. I enjoyed reading the gay priests book , the Spirituality of Coming Out, I’m reading other books about the personal stories of cross dressers and transsexuals but too often the development and focus is physical and emotional, with the occasional great intellectual piece but little focus on spirituality. Certainly some writers and those I know have lifted up their eyes.  

I love the line in the Great Kahuna, ‘Jesus had nothing to say about women in business suits.’  He did say “Love god and love thy neighbour as yourself.”  He had nothing to say about cross dressing or transgender. Indeed he loved children and women but had nothing much to say about sex.  The church however  has for hundreds of years been obsessed with sex.

I’ve been called in for the FIT test, my age, and a standard screening. I still was reminded of the Scottish Comedian Conolly talking about his colonoscopy. “You y get to an age over 50 when the doctors lose all interest in your genitals but develop an inordinate interest  in  your arse.”

Time to walk Gilbert. Best part of the day.  

 

Covid and Canadian Communism

Communist China released the chimera virus from the Wuhan lab, killed the whistle blowing doctors then disappeared Hong Kong freedom demonstrators, while Canada continued to give Xi Linping millions of ‘aid’ and set up Chinese Huawei 5 g systems throughout the country.  5 eyes alliance considers Justin Trudeau a security risk. He wont travel to the states.  He hardly leaves his mother’s basement.  His eyes look like saucers,.

I’m still afraid. I’m listening to people struggling daily now and it’s systemic corruption.  The level of distraction increases.  I find myself at times unable to shake the sadness.  All day I hear of the business losses, the unemployment, the fear of the future, the threat of war. The incompetence of leadership at the federal level, and all the paid riots and civil war against America remind me of the history I read of pre WWI, the pro Hitler forces WWII and the Maoist Revolution.  It’s same story different names, 

 ‘I will not fear financial insecurity.’  Yet the future at times looks bleak.  Jesus commanded ‘Be not Afraid’. So ‘worrying is wicked!”  I remember in a particularly bad blow off the north of Vancouver Island, high seas and wind, night falling and the sailboat taking on water.  My older Christian sailing friend was at the helm.  I was bailing in the cockpit below him. We’d been discussing the Bible the night before.  “Are we wicked yet,” he asked with a pirates gleam.  We were definitely wicked

I’m feeling wicked these days despite all my training and experience. 

I think I’d like a sex change. I’m weary of warrior William and defending women and children.  I’m tired of seeing all the deaths by abortion and the knowing the wealth of abortionists. Bad women have lied and Miley Cyrus rides her ‘wrecking ball’ . Eva Brawn rises from the dead.  At least Stalin’s wife killed herself.  Mao’s Jiang Quing was the ugliest dirtiest stupidest woman of history.  Now Peng Liyuan is the most disgusting disease of a woman the world has ever known.  She smiles as she celebrates her husbands murdering innocents, spreading the stink and contagion of her filth all over the world.  

Peng Liyuan is Eva Brawn.  Worse.

I don’t like Sophie Trudeau but she’s not the evil that Peng Liyuan is. Sophie is just a shallow disgusting trashy bit of self centred fluff who married a stupid stoner without principles, heart or brains. A tool. Sophie’s like Margaret, his mother who oozes entitlement now. 

The Charbonneau Enquiry confirmed that Quebec and Montreal and McGill University are ruled by mafia and biker gangs.  SNC Lavalin is now linked to the Picton Farms cannibalism and the child sex trafficking of Libya.  The head of CSIS says that the Communist Military has infiltrated Canadian education, media and government to the highest level. I talk to immigrants who have escaped ruthless totalitarian regimes like Canada is fast becoming.  They say they don’t know where to go now.  “I never thought it would happen so quickly here.” The Venezuelean grandmother weeps, telling her sons the horrors they have escaped. I remember all the refugees I saw telling of rape, theft and murder.  The Iranian girls raped by the Moslem religious police. The Vietnamese women stripped of all their wealth and raped in trains, the only thing remaining, a diamond drilled into a molar.  Freedom’s ‘just another word for nothing left to lose’.  It’s the lull before the storm.  

I read about a mother Kingfisher defending her eggs from a snake and began to cry.  I remember my mother at times like this.  I miss the strength of women of her era like Mrs. Churchill.  

My Aunt Sally was a soft, brilliant, stylish, tough executive assistant. She flew all over the world. She especially loved attending Baptist Conventions.  She was executive assistant to  the Canadian Ambassador in Washington during the war. I loved to listen to her stories.,  She was my favourite Christian. She and her gorgeous  girlfriend, Babe, the Executive Assistant to the Head of Esso.  When I visited Toronto and stayed with them as an older boy, they always made me laugh.  The two of them were so eye catching, glamorous  and confident. They reminded me always of that picture of Marilyn Munro and Rita Hayworth.  

Mom was the beautiful solid family woman. Her older sister was the wild single divorcee, I remember in the highest heels and the deepest red lipstick. They were two sides of Christian women.  Dad even suggested once that she and Babe were lovers.  He didn’t think she liked men much.  Dad liked the husband she divorced.  He was a good sort, “Your aunt didn’t want to be married to a man,” he said. “She was more interested in the Mrs. than the man.”  He didn’t say it unkindly, They were best of friends and he loved when she visited Mom because she was happiest when family was all together.    My aunt divorced and never married.  She had a rich network of beautiful single or divorced Christian women friends,  with Babe as her constant companion. Maybe they were just celibate. I’ll never know.  She lived in a building with gay men friends so over the years I’ve wondered. I realize that the gay people I knew growing up were always around 1-2 % of the society is a significant number.  Looking back I remember the coach, the gym teacher, the women neighbour. There wasn’t discrimination. When the adults spoke of them it wasn’t with disdain but rather like saying, “they’re Ukranian’.  

It’s funny now that I contemplate a sex change seeing nothing in the future for old single Christian men.  It’s not surgery I think of but  more like switching teams. Heterosexual has become as dirty a word as Christian.  Social communism calls anyone successful ‘oppressive’.  The greatest oppressor of Hocky was Goretsky, the dirty disgusting white privilege symbols, whose legs and hands would be cut off today’s to allow Antifida, Gender Students and BLM get ahead.  Intersectionalism and the liberalism of Justin Trudeau. Good old Biological Darwinism.  They won’t be satisfied till all Conservative men and women are castrated so maybe I should do it myself.  No one admits that one of the attracctivions of transsexualism is ‘identification with the aggressor’.  Stockholm syndrome and the gender wars.  

I find myself reflecting on those outsiders I knew growing up.  The lesbian couple who lived down the street. The gay men I knew in the dance world. I’d been the golden boy and like my friend passed all the male tests of masculinity.  I wasn’t able to protect my own child from abortion.   I was ridiculed for even caring and condemned for trying,. I envy the joy I know my friends who are grandfather’s feel today.  That’s the greatest accomplishment for men.  Like the mothers and grandmother’s who tell me their greatest accomplishment and love despite their awards and diplomas are their children and grand children. Family. Communism does everything to stamp out family, It’s the principle threat to the aetheist God of State. 

 I  know that the suit jacket and jeans I wear are based on the British uniform and the country work clothes. I’m weary of being a target.  All that fighting the good fright for others has worn me down.   I feel free in silk and have a sense of the lightness of being in a skirt or dress.  I like sandals and summer clothes rather than the heavy winter wear. I miss the tropics sailing in only shorts or shirtlesss in a sarong.  There seems no merit in the role of older childless single Christian man.  I’ve done my time as a monk. I discussed joining a monastery again but really don’t want to be a celebrate and love my own barbecue. 

 I’ve lived the life of a boyfriend.  It’s a good service position.  I’ve been a husband to angry entitled wives. Marriages begin well and years of bliss one day change and the criticism began.  I really believe I’ve known 20 years of great marriage all together but the three years of divorce, the smug judges and the years of rebuilding, I can’t do another Canadian marriage.  I think it’s my job. They could wear one mood and one face in the home and smiled so sweetly outside, switching on and off.  I just never felt I left the office.  I lasted years in the asylum when they’d refuse to get help and their sicknesses got worse. They found someone or some group that blamed me. The courts always blamed the man. I was always the wife as well as the principle provider working several jobs and in the end taking care of the sick one, trying to cover for her addictions,   I’ve been a wife for decades to professionals and never was ‘good enough’. There was constant criticism in the end.    I remember she wanted a bigger house.  We’d just bought her a house. But they bought a bigger house and now our house didn’t survive to have two cats in the yard.  I served,  did my time and frankly, in the end, it seemed best not to disagree.  The consequences were unforgiving.  90% good times in marriage but the 10% bad was not worth it in the end.  Three strikes you’re out.  I married in the end for children only to find they didn’t want children too. It’s not like I didn’t say this either. “I thought you’d change your mind. I never wanted to have children.” said the princess. 

I hear the song in my head ‘girl’s just want to have fun’ and think yes, that’s what I want.  I wonder  to if I’m missing that summer of 69.  I sometimes reflect back on the hedonism and frivolity and community of silly love and peace when I was naive and really did sing Kumbaya.  I smoked dope with the most beautiful girl in the world and we had such fun till the summer of years ended and we both went our separate ways.  I was always searching for God in all the wrong places. 

Divorces were the nails in the coffin. More so was the call to serve.  A clear message in a chapel and the certainty that I was doing God’s will in my work and service. My ex wife hated that I worked in the north with the natives. They admired the suburban doctors and the high rise suited clinicians who acted like lawyers and accountants and never wore the white lab coat outside the office. They hated the calls I took at home and established their practice in university protected by the institution and safe in the centre of the herd surrounded by men and women who protected this main military unit. I was out beyond the wire, in the wilderness, too many nights alone, afraid, always afraid. A scout. At best militia.  I volunteered.  They were smarter and didn’t.

I thought I could treat her addiction getting her away from her home. I thought I could lift her out of the misery of her past. I thought that we could be free to serve as doctors and all that sordid family addiction, their heroin and alcoholism and the suicides and death of their families would be behind us.  But it wouldn’t work. She came back to that and the lies and the all night long abuse. I loved that scene in the movie where the guy had to work the next day and the wife was keeping him up all night on coke.  

I sometimes reflect back on the betrayals and communists destruction of family, Marx and Engles insisting that the State must rule. I remember asking for help.  It’s all so long ago.  The betrayals and the lies and the psychopaths and sociopaths and gratitude. I survived.  I carried on. I was blessed to have men and women who were older and wiser and more experienced to talk to. My brother and family were there for me too. No one blamed her.  Men mostly blame men. Women blame men too. 

I prayed and meditated and paid off the debts she’d created and again built a life afraid of the violence of women, their lies and the mob and their protection in the courts.  I was wrong too,  but found my self saying,  like Lear, “I’m more sinned against than sinning,” Then I met my friends, a band of brothers, all who had scars from divorces and sisters and the evil tyranny of beurocrats and corrupt government and the lie of booze.  They’d known drunken judges and evil dictators. We’d all let our guards down. We had all been fools.  We laughed.  God how we laughed.  All of us falsely accused.  One with a dozen scars from knife attacks and broken bottles across his head and the woman was the ‘victim’. She said she was ‘oppressed’ , took his house and money and his reputation. I was cuckolded but he was utterly smeared by her lies.  We met women who like us had been deceived. They didn’t think it was gender. This new adult class of women, not the girls of feminism, the real women, the ones who looked at good and evil and felt they’d failed as well.  We were sinners and the groups now had neon signs saying ‘thou shalt not judge’. 

Jung described Animus and Anima.  There was further the good feminine and the bad feminine, the good male and the bad male of myth.  It’s a thin line and years of studying philosophy and theology I learned that attachment and love were together , like courage and fear.  We are all Adam and Eve.  The stories are of ourselves.  In this moment I’m alone and all the stories are mirrors of myself. I am the married and the divorced. I’m dancer and the dance to quote Campbell.  Emerson summed it up with his poem, the red slayer. ‘If the red slayer thinks he slays, or the slain thinks he’s slain, they know not well the ways I keep and turn and toss again.”  If she’d wanted to kill me I’d be dead,  We loved, not the thin love of Canada but the love of ancient passion.  

My memory of her hurting me is balanced by my forgetting her being hurt by me. She was physical. I was emotional.  The joke about Sado Masochism goes, What does the masochist say, “beat me, beat me’....what does the sadist say, “no’.

It’s all coupled and only the stupidity and ignorance of the courts which are only interested in money could reduce the spiritual and love to the merger and sordid. The Canadian Courts are Marxist too, shallow, new and without depth. The greatest couple studied by science, asked if they thought of divorce, answered,  “divorce never, murder yes.”  Communism is devoid of passion. It’s just one dimensional. Everything is power. Lizard brain entertainment.   Commitments don’t exist in communist countries. There’s only single people there. 

For depth you must have family.  Discussing the religion of Hinduism and Buddhism, the Jain told Laura and I  that the Hindu Buddha has his eyes open and the Buddhist Buddha had his eyes closed. One is the religion of the family and the other of the individual and monk. I studied with Christian monks and loved the Greek Orthodox man who gave me a cup of tea and a cookie while I sat with him in my heels and grey skirt, white blouse and grey jacket.  At that moment we were disciples beyond gender.  I felt like Jesus and that he was Mary. Martha had made the biscuits.

Inside of us are all the stories of our being, the play of our family and marriages and families and friends and work relations.  My native minister friend loves to close her prayers with ‘all my relations’ and laughs at the tales of the ‘two spirits’.  I think of Bukaroo Bonzai and Raiders from the 8th dimension, the catholic trapped by his past in the wall and lost with the aliens.  Transformations and transitions and the comfort of being inside. 

I’ve been blessed as a healer. I’ve felt like the Channel of St. Francis.  I’ve hidden the stigmata of my hands and feet and been afraid to be exposed.  As long as people focus on ny saying ‘fuck’ I feel I’m safe but not so much now.  Communists are too closed and sick to ‘fuck off’.  They mowed the Tibetan monks down with machine guns.  The Dalai Lama was the child they sought to kill but he escaped to India just as Herod had wanted to kill Jesus but he escaped to Egypt.

Now the abortionists don’t take chances. They kill all the babies before they’re born. The satanist who love sex with children and eat human flesh can’t afford to have a messiah born again or the return of the Messiah.  The mark of the beast is on them. Revelations is showing in the stories of the land.  I prefer the image of the Borg.  I see the left wing Liberals demanding we all assimilate. That’s the lie of communist speak, 1984, the hypocrisy.  Animal Farm. Goebbels said just tell a bigger lie.  Walls are no good say all the corrupt with their own walls. Guns are no good say all the corrupt with their own guns. The young like the words. Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto read pretty but adult life is messy and behaviour tells. I’m becoming Klinger in the story of MASH.  I’m not a woman. I’m a man. But I don’t want to wear uniforms anymore.  I don’t want to wear sensible shoes.  I’m too old for heels too.

The world is sad and afraid. I’m sad and afraid. ‘Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.’ Samuel Johnson paraphrased by Dylan. ‘What’s a good girl like you doing in a place like this.”   Communists have always killed half their countries and taken the best. Kill the rich and give to the poor is their slogan.  Kill the rich, ‘ they say, then they give to themselves’ In my mind I’m poor knowing the wealth of the wealth. “Feel the Bern” Bernie said with his many mansion

 Xi Linping has his many duchaus and private armies.  I’m rich though, compared to the homeless addict so he’s told that I’m the problem. Communism destroys the middle class. Marx was a black and white thinker.  He never understood history..  He had no depth.  A Kafetch,.  The moderates like the Mensheviks and parliamentarians died before the Molotov Cocktails and guns of he Bolsheviks.  Lenin, Stalin, Molotov and Trotsky made short thrift of them just like the Communist Chinese genocided Tibet and now are murdering the geniuses of Hong Kong.   He who forgets history is doomed to repeat it.

I mostly feel like a voice over on a comic strip. I struggle with the physics of time and free will and determinism.  The Big Bang theory and God.  It’s easier to follow the programming. Don’t deviate. Internalize the terror.  I think of Walden Pond and Thoreau and civil disobedience.  These thugs and killers soil the name of Martin Luther and Mandela.

I’m a coward.  Courage is overcoming fear. I did that as a man and fought all the good fights and never backed down. I fought for the safety of my patients. I fought for my friends. It began in school fighting bullies and protecting nerds and girls.  I’ve been shot at too many times and stabbed and faced too many gangs as an adult. I found walking in high heels on Davie  street,  being targeted by a car load of thugs,   I gained  new admiration for women in their vulnerability. The brown thugs brutalized a smaller gay man that night He was in the news. My friend Laura is tiny by comparison.  She’s shown such courage in her life.   I loved the courage and valour of the pregnant girls, I new,  especially in all the  deliveries, I did.  

I loved my father. He was the greatest man I knew. I miss him but I’ve found myself missing my mother and how she held me as a child.  The safety that was there. 

Feminism never celebrated women. It celebrated girls who acted like men.  I was a women’s liberationist and still am. I believe in meritocracy and love that my friend did plastic surgery better than I did. We put it down to her tiny hands and love of delicacy. I liked the heavy handed surgery and planned to do general surgery or orthopaedics.  She sewed. I chopped wood. We were friends. There never was competition. Yet all my life I’ve suffered from lesser women who wanted to compete with me. My equals and superiors never bother. I compete against myself as do they.  We stopped competing with others back in our teens. Adults compete with themselves.  

There is no benefit for a man in competition with a woman ,but there is no loss for a woman who loses a fight with a man.  It’s all in the light weight and heavy weight and professional boxing.  Now I’ve a BA student who wants to tell me, a doctor-doctor-doctor , what to do. It’s the same thing.  Communism.  Marx loved that he ‘turned Hegel on his head. ‘  The politics of the fringe. The night of the long knives the brown shirts raided the sex institute and destroyed all the files. Antifida and BLM are the Brown Shirts today.The Leader of BLM was a sex trafficker and a Marxist.  Same playbook ,  different day. 

A black woman dressed me in high wedgies and a short skirt, Jamaican colours, yellows, reds and blacks. I wanted to make a pilgrimage to Stonewall.  The girls in pink beat the boys in blue.  The photographer owner of Faces of New York followed me for blocks begging me to let him take my picture for his book. I regret that I said no today. At the time it was a personal thing.  I’d been raped and it was called ‘just busting his cherry’.  I didn’t care any more. I’d met so many people who’d lost legs and arms and brains but then and wanted to stop the silly.  I sat in the bar drinking coffee and watched the drag show with all the rich young people dressed in power clothes. They never knew the 60’s.  They didn’t know history.  I remember the sound of the bullets going by my ears as the passing car full of rednecks shot at the long haired hippy.  I never ran faster that time the Saskatchewan boys picked me up hitchhiking and told me that they’d given me a ride because they’d always wanted to beat on a long hair. I jumped out of the moving car and ran through the cornfields with three older guys chasing me with baseball bats.  I”m so thankful I was fast.  

I loved the book Pink Zwastica and the discussion of the sexual deviance and pedophilia in the SS. The Mexican sheriff over tequila told me he wasn’t a homosexual, “I have too much sex for women alone. I have to fuck boys and girls.  I am a real man.”  The man who had come out of prison after years told me “I’ve never been gay. I fuck men but I’m not gay.’

The Nazi killed the effeminate.  Those were the gays the Nazis jailed and sent to their death in Auschwitz..

I treated Sadists and Masochists.  The women who loved to cause pain and torture were to my mind the worst. They sometimes used men. I was shocked working in the jails and with the dangerously insane.  Those with Governor General warrants were a real education. I have often thought the teachers in liberal arts schools and political scientists should be required to spend some time there just like we used to get gang teens to tour the jails to meet the real criminal world. I’ve met such trash and heard such bullshit out of the ignorant and naive who teach at the university.  Psychopaths would just as soon eat you as talk with you. There are terms, ‘educable’ and ‘trainable’; for a reason.  But drugs trapped people in their minds and so many people can live in bubbles and the internet now unites us with our kind whatever that is.

I’m not alone but I’m an outsider and I’m thankful for Gladwell’s writing and others.  

Today I’m hoping to get my desk. I have to remove the couch to make room for it. I will shower first.  I’ll have another cup of coffee later.  I like walking the dying dog. I take my camera and get pictures while he lingers over scents, blind and sore. We both walk stiffly at times. It depends on the weather. 

  

Dreams in a Pandemic

Covid 19 continues like fires that raged last summer.  Each day there is new news.  Finally borders closing.  Corrupt politicians insider dealing with the information. Lies coming out of Communist China. Fakes news and rotating narratives.  Each day we feel better.  Only a few weeks of this high alert. The wave will hit us and pass in one to two months. Reminds me sailing solo in the middle of the Pacific waiting for the hurricane to hit.

I was booked for the Transgender medical conference.  It was cancelled.  I was booked for Esprit, the annual May transgender conference. I’d  hoped to be going. Lighter hearted. Less afraid. I’d bought a baby blue spring jacket for the occasion.  I wonder when and where I’ll wear it. These times are more pyjamas at home or cammo in the streets days. Not a time for high heels. Big girl panty times. Where’s the fun in that.   

There’s that fear that something will burst. But there have been no riots.  Order prevails.  Our local government with Mr. Horgan and Mr. Dix are doing admirably.  Nationally the government has been as silly and out of step as funny walks of Monty Python but provincially we’ve been saved by reason and maturity. Even the Vancouver City mayor is hearing the concern of the majority of citizens and reassuring us that there will be order.  Our Vancouver Police are the best.

The tension is palpable. The city is a ghost town. All the seasons tickets to theatres and concerts have been cancelled till June. I have front row seats to the Guess Who in July. I’m so glad. I watched and listened yesterday to Burton Cummings doing a real time on line concert from his home.  “I will sing a rhapsody”, he sang. .  How beautiful and uplifting.

I went by the meat store and bought a week or so of protein provisions for my adopted family.  The man is so hard working.  Each day despite the times he goes out to work construction necessary for the city.  So many workers like him now being recognized as the unsung hero’s.  We must have roads. His beautiful wife is home with the children and the new baby. I loved seeing Gilbert’s little friends. It was sad that they couldn’t play. The little girl wanted to hug him and me but we kept our distance.  I drove away thinking that in these tough times one family will have a feast.  So much extra home costs and runs on stores a concern.  I had my own steaks too.  Barbecues will work even after infrastructure lapses. My freezer is on electricity and propane.

Gilbert and I had the best charbroil steak with potatoes and butter and sour cream. I drank tonic with quinine.

More texting.  Calls to patients.  Refilling prescriptions. I’d done the methadone clinic already that morning keeping the essentially medications to my patients most at risk. Helping pharmacist serve this most debilitated population. 

I’d been to the ophthalmologist and obtained my new RX. I was down to my last pair of glasses. Now thanks the One Time Optical folk I’ll have a couple of new pair next week.  Less squinting. I’m thinking of things like this. If the city closes down or disease quarantines us or there’s shortages for months, what essentials do I need.  Glasses.  I was glad to get my laptop to my friends. I’ve a new one and didn’t need the old one. I have a back up ipad and they had one everyone used. Now they are more secure with more entertainment choices for the children.

Having sailed solo on oceans I’m used to survivalist thinking. I have a hand held Hamm radio in storage. A trip to the locker might be an idea.  I’ve hand held radios.  I tell families that you don’t want members going off without a cell phone or a radio.  We need to keep in touch. Survivalist thinking. The real thing, not the often silly tv drama. 

I keep my gas tank in the car filled.  I have the motorcycle. I’m going to check out the bicycle soon.  Grease it up.  It’s good to think ahead. Get essential repairs done while shops are still open. Certainly the local businesses can use the work and all one has to do is maintain social distancing but only for essentials. I told my friend to phone a garage and drop off the car leaving the keys and walk home paying by credit card and picking it up later.

It’s a slower paced world.  I am walking more and its healthier. I may return to a svelte shape rather than the pear I’ve become.

Last night I dreamed wonderful dreams. They were my recurrent place.  I’ve these places that I go to in my dream world .I believe they exist in the afterlife and the parallel world.  This one is the peninsula where my sailboat is. I’m sailing and at a marina. In this dream I’m actually flying in a balloon looking down at the expanses of ocean where great wooly sheep are running in the hundreds on the water or perhaps in shallows. The feelings I’m having are like the ecstasy I felt trade wind sailing all alone in the middle of the South Pacific. Back at the marina the men all have rifles and scopes and groups are going out hunting moose.  There’s so many moose in the hills. I walk by a female and talk to a fellow who respects my age and maturity and says, “It will be my first moose I’ve shot.. Nothing new for you in this.”  I smile.  A bit like my father smiled at me. The young man learning and the old man teaching.  Sharing knowledge.  The great gifts.  Wisdom not things.  I’m comforted in the dream by the families and mutual care. I’m with a woman I think I know , but she comes and goes in my dreams, probably afraid to stay.  I’m a fairly dangerous dude in all ways. I think I’ll shoot a moose in the afternoon. I hear one in my mind talking to me.  He’s told me where he is.  I don’t have to go yet. The young man hopefully will find him but I’ve oiled my gun and put it in the quad by my sailboat. The snow capped mountains are beautiful in the morning sun .

Last week I was given cherry cake in my dream and it tasted like ambrosia in my dream. I can’t remember tasting in my dreams but this was exquisite. I imagine older with death staring at us all , war and rumors of war, the haunting streets, the anxiety and all the heightened awareness which comes with anxiety, I’m escaping in my dreams. I don’t fear death and am wondering if I’m preparing to come back as a woman in a next life. Maybe this is just self soothing. As a man I’ve always been provider protector always caring for everyone. We only played dress up in good times or safe in side. Outside among strangers it was always suited up, even armed. The men’s suit jacket based on the 19th Century British military jacket. Now old I prefer to live in pyjama bottoms. Not the satin of Hefner, more the red tartan flannel of the scot.

I believe early Christians believed in reincarnation. I’m living in a multi verse now.  My mind is not reality.  Reality is this present. The dreams may just be escapism. I’m so exhausted after the days of tension that I love my bed and falling asleep.

Today I’ve woken without cough or sore throat or fever or tight lungs. I love that I don’t have to be with the sick and can go about my day like I normally do on the weekend, avoiding people. During the week I’m too much with people so this is not new.

More cures announced. The science is amazing. The speed of research light years ahead of my youth experiences of previous epidemics. . Advances in technology. So much fun watching Moore’s law real time.  

Good leadership from Mr. Trump. Singapore and Taiwan so brilliant.  I love their hand held temperature scanner. A patient told me they have them in construction work.  Dr. Bonnie  Henry doing really well.  Great BC CDC site.  I think there’s more that Mr. Trump and the western world know about this Communist China created virus.  There’s war within war.  I wouldn’t put it past the communists to try to collapse the economy to get “One World Order’ with the greedy power hungry UN dictators in control.  

I joked yesterday when I heard that China might have the first vaccine.

  “Sorry,” I said.  “They probably made this virus. I woudn trust a vaccine they made. I’ll wait for one MADE IN AMERICA”.  

The truth be told I’d love the one being made in Saskatchewan.  But the Israelis and Aussie New Zealanders have them. In the meantime the treatments just keep rolling out of the research labs. Anti virals and hydroxy chloroquine. 

Trans Scripts, Part 1: The Women

I almost didn’t share this because I felt guilty for going to the Firehall Arts Centre when so many venues were closing. We’d had tickets to the Pacific Theatre but they’d cancelled their run because of the Carona Virus.  The notice had come out encouraging all venues over 200 to close. The Firehall had only 150 and reduced seats to 70%. 

Our friends were women in the show.  We were so looking forward to this intimate evening.  Playwright Paul Lucas had interviewed over 75 trans people around the world to develop this amazing show.  It was co directed by Cameron Mackenzie and Fay Nas. Josie Boyce, Carolyn Dimmer, Amy Fox, Quanah Style, Morgane Oger, Sabrina Symington and Julie Vas were featured. All of them are highly accomplished women who acted their parts superbly. We actually thought they were telling their own stories, the sharing was so intimate.  

The show reminded me of Quilters a play in which several women discuss their lives at turn of the century Canada as they quilt, the stories taken from letters to family in there former homes in England.

This real and present expression of each of the contributions was so dynamic we were transfixed. Stories of suicide attempts, physical attacks, addiction and recovery,  shame and cross dressing, coming to the realization of the meaning of their difference then the process of transformation. It was such a moving story of relationship and the growing sense of safety and meaning from originating as outsiders and objects so often of bullying to finding their tribe.. Having made a pilgrimage in New York I loved the references to Stonewall.  The reminder of the very recent legal gains in Canada against discrimination against transsexuals was a stark reminder of majority power.  I have known a hundred such individuals and felt that the play captured the essence of their experience.  Sex and spirituality were both addressed openly.  

Zee Theatre and Frank Theatre in association with Firehall Theatre presented the evening.  I love the venue each time I go and do hope that this show will be done again after the present viral ‘love in the time of cholera’ passes.

Having cross dressed over the years, my first main stage role in acting as a teen ager being a woman, I have some personal appreciation of the stigma and shame associated with being queer ,especially as a Christian, where I’ve know the greatest support ,as well as having to face the hardest challenges.  My closest friend Laura and I so enjoyed the presentation which captured and expressed so well the experience,  of mixture curse and blessing.

9-11 years old My Teddy Bear in Satin Pyjamas

I don’t remember the year these events occurred.  I just have thought about them alot over the years.  They probably followed my work. All day long I ask patients questions and naturally ask myself the same questions. Having worked with transexuals for many years one of the issues that arises is whether they had any childhood experiences with cross dressing or playing with toys that were deemed cross gender, eg boys playing with dolls.

The interesting thing is that normal development is associated with varying degrees of confusion so it’s not really an ‘indication’ for a sex change.  The homo phobias and trans phobias of parents aren’t at issue. 90% of children revert to their biological determined gender before adulthood. There’s just some tourist activity in young children.  The politics have however entered here with a tremendous ‘recruitment’ push to have children ‘join’ the ranks of the various minorities.  As adults I truly support this but as for children I consider this trend 1984. It’s fraught with all manner of future pain and cost.  The scientific data simply says it’s high risk and not to be entered lightly yet there are idealogues among doctor, psychologists, and psychiatrists who believe in that perfidious notion of ‘constructionism’.  Intellectually the ideas of memes is good but to jump to the idea that a meme is a gene is arty at best.  

The memory that came to mind for me was my teddy bear. I don’t know where or when I got it. A cute little guy.  What my mom did though was to make the teddy bear pyjamas.  I always thought my mom would have liked a girl.  She physically couldn’t have children after my brother and I were born so that wasn’t an option. Things would have been very different in my life if I’d had a sister.  I feel I put girls on a pedestal and associated them with my really very wonderful mother, whereas my friends who had sisters knew them for less than perfect beings. Despite divorces today I tend to put women on a pedestal at times seeing them as having the capacity for the ‘virgin mother’.  God approached Mary first not Joseph.  It’s also a latin thing. Mi madre.  The perfect woman.  This for men translates into the ‘Madonna-Whore” and the incapacity of man to consider his mother romping in the bed and hence the Oedipal Condition not uncommon in men whereas the equivalent is rare in women. Women have no problem thinking of their mother and father rutting in general.  Women especially after they become mothers’ themselves are much more ‘down to earth’ compared to men.  They are into their bodies more even than men in this way.

Now when I was somewhere 7 to 9 there was a little girl a few blocks away. We’d play together in her basement with her dolls. We liked each other in school and the mothers thought some play time together would be good. So for a few visits I was quite happy to be at her house playing with her Ken and Barbie dolls. I brought my teddy bear and I think Mom even made another outfit.  Well, this caused some concern with the fathers. I remember Dad telling Mom that I wasn’t a girl and that he didn’t think it was good that she was having me play with dolls.  “But it’s just a teddy bear.” I remember my mom answering.  

Anyway that was the end of my playing with my teddy bear and my friends Ken and Barbie dolls.  As boys we’d play in girls games but frankly they weren’t nearly as much fun as what we as boys did. I even ended up eating mud pies when the girls on my street made them in their make believe ovens and gave these to me.  As boys and girls we lived in parallel worlds.  Even Kirk who had older sisters had no desire to hang out with them except when they were putting on plays in the summer and coopted us.

Somewhere in the storage locker I have my teddy bear, I believe. He may well have been chewed up by one of the dogs. I dress the dogs up in sweaters and coats so perhaps that came as a result of my exposure to girls and ‘dress up’ games.  I always liked new boys clothes as a kid.  I put that down to wearing mostly second hand, hand me down clothing from my brother. But I did like ‘natty’ clothes and I liked having my picture taken, not being shy, and liking positive attention. Mom dressed us up for church or at least encouraged us to look our best and I definitely liked being told by the older ladies. “Aren’t you looking nice today Billy’.  So it was no surprise later when disco struck I was into that Staying Alive attire.  But again I put that down to the years of acting and the enjoyment of character and costume.  

The teddy bear, however, in his satin pyjamas, looking a little like a furry Hugh Hefner, still holds a special place in the memory.