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. 

  

Checking In, Covid 19

When I was at sea alone in the North Pacific in the midst of hurricanes and storms, high seas and unbearable anxiety, I’d listen on the Hamm Radio for our daily contact.  The Hamm Radio operators liked making contact with us. Odd men in little rooms surrounded by electronics reaching out to solo sailors bouncing about in the middle of oceans thousands of miles from shore. The Hamm operators who managed these nets motivation primarily seemed was to be to check out their equipment’s capability and to play the Hamm Radio Game. Solo sailors like me were playing the Solo Sailor Game with a whole lot of moving parts and games in the Bluewater Solo Sailor Game. I was so thankful these Hamm Radio kindly Asperger sorts were out their on land.

There was always uncertainty. I was wedged in the aft berth with the boat rolling and tossing about. My dog and cat were crouched in beside me, their only comfort, the suspect security of my body.  I’d hear the crackly call and pressing the button on my receiver respond.  Across a thousand miles of empty sea the voice of a person I’d met in SAN Francisco or Vancouver would reach me. I’d pass on my Latitude and Longitude, give him my course, say that all was well when often it wasn’t but it was ‘well enough’.  The contacts were brief. We were strangers, relatively.  Casual friends brought together by mutual interests.  

I was one of a very lose network of adventurers. I was solo sailing across the North Pacific in winter, desperately staying alive, sometimes at all odds. By contrast he was enjoying the warmth of his home trying with arcane and modern equipment to reach out and touch someone bouncing signals off various waves of atmosphere.  I lived each day for the contact, some days more.  When I came more into tropical waters I was handed off to another person, this one a total stranger.I’d give him my lat and long and course. Someone would then record that on a map somewhere and family who followed such things would sigh. I’d once even made a radio telephone contact so that I’d be able to speak with family.  I wanted to reassure them, to let them know I was alive. They were glad and I was so thankful I had someone who cared. I’d doubted that I’d survive that hurricane and it was very uncertain. Surely they had their doubts.  The dog and cat and I continued on.  

One day I sailed into Radio Bay and anchored. The world stopped moving.  The rich scent of land and foliage and flowers enlivened my senses.  For 24 days on that passage I’d checked in.  I enjoyed checking in.

Now I’ve a group of medical colleagues and psychiatric colleagues. We’ve met together annually for a conference in different places in the world.  After we keep contact with a increasingly sophistical email list called ‘cyberdocs’.  Sometimes weeks go by when I don’t check in. Then I do.  I’ve a different dog today. The cat died to and another came and went.  I’m in the warmth of my home and the world isn’t on the lean and I”m not afraid of sinking.  I still check in though.  I feel good knowing I have friends, people who care for me , as I care for them.  It’s like the place where everyone knows my name. I’ve never known a bar like that though the community pub I visited when first I lived in South Putney had that flavour.  

I’ve heard they put bells on toilets in Putney now so the neighbours of elderly know that the old are still living. I’ m aging but years I hope before I get bells on my toilet. I’m still hoping to wear bells on my toes..  In our group we laugh a lot.  We cry too but mostly we laugh. We expresss resentments and gratitudes, share platitudes and stories and even a bit of wisdom. One of us who has now died wrote the book, “Spirituality of Imperfection’.  Some of us are famous like that but most of us, like me live in the mixed blessing of relative mediocrity. Walking talking accessorized worms with varying degrees of sentience.  

Locally we have now another cybergroup of like minded doctors who pride ourselves on our caring.  We value humility whether we have it or not. We share this common collection of character traits and values that we hold as true. We have mutual admiration as well. We know what it means to become a doctor. We don’t denigrate each other’s achievements. In our own lives we are too often encountering those who make themselves look taller by chopping their heads off.  Steal from the rich the mob cries thinking that things of value can be taken like objects.  The thieves and animals keen in the streets now looting and stealing. Our group doesn’t do that. We are workers and achievers. We appreciate things aged and pure. We believe in meritocracy.  We celebrate individual effort, thank our teachers, love the guild and apprenticeship, and respect the years that go to making that which is rare.   We understand we are not alone even if we forget it.   Checking in is a reminder.  

They asked me to be the organizer of the next checking in meeting.  We’ve sat around the province at our various computers looking like the opening of the Brady Bunch tv show, our our little squares of faces with varying backgrounds. So many of us are greying.  It surprises me when I see us. I’ve coloured dyed hair with vanity.  We’ve known each other,  many, 20 years or more.  I am reassured.  I  tell the really mensch organization folk among them that I can’t organize.  I’m right now very disorganized.  I’m thankful for the call. I want to rise to the occasion but it’s like when I was in my boat at sea.  I’d be asked for something like the wind speed and required going up  on deck. At that moment  I was afraid to go on deck, because it was so bad outside, I didn’t know I’d make it back, even tethered as I always was to the ship.

Now the word ‘organizer’ shocked me.  I reflected on the disorganization and uncertainty of my life today. In my garage I have two lap top computers, a flat screen monitor, a printer and a filing cabinet on wheels.  I’ve a cell phone and sometimes also use an iPad.  I’ve some books . The space is messy with flotsam, papers,  pens and debris. I’ve thrown this office and control centre together on a folding table. I didn’t know it would go on this long. I’d started it as a temporary solution to the announcement of a plague. We have all entered again into Camus, Plague.  Kafka is still struggling to get into the Castle. And I just want to make love in the time of Cholera while practicing social distancing. 

I’ve gone to my room and stayed for weeks, now months.  At first I was very afraid. I’d been sick early in the year and had been unable to breathe, coughing and panicking and believing that I was far from God. I’d been scared then. I’d thought how effective water boarding would be on me.  I am terribly addicted to breathe. I take it for granted too much though I love to breathe. I couldn’t then. Repeatedly I was humbled. This virus was announced weeks later and we were told we all could get it and that it would be best if we went inside for a while.  I was very relieved.  It was my fourth epidemic.  I’d already survived the Aids epidemic working in the main hospital emergency bled on, spat on and assaulted but I’d acquired tuberculosis serving up north.  A year of medications cured me after I still wheezed climbing mountains. Now I’m old and wheeze making love.  

We  know now the virus likes the old and sick.   Others are safe,.

Each day I phone or connect online on the computer with a dozen or so folk who so often sound or look like I must have looked to the Hamm operator. I have felt such love knowing that the mere connection has sustained them that day and that week.  I’ve repeatedly heard the tell tale tone of ‘cabin fever’ I’d first heard working in the Arctic. I’ve known too that just talking and checking in I’ve helped another human remain grounded. There’s such relief and gratitude in their voices.  I now know the Hamm Net Operators loved that connection as much as hearing from me the loudness and clarity of their transmission.   I’m glad to have reached my patients too.  I have so many to see and talk to. There are several staff in several clinics asking me to talk to more and more.  I’m feeling nails on a chalk board and the terror or just anxiety and irritability transfers to me even at a distance through communication lines and atmosphere. I have a satellite dish outside my home. I sometime talk to people around the world though mostly I’m just talking to people in this city.  It’s all about distance and time still.  I feel of service and that sustains me. I’m a part of this greater whole. I”m a contributing member of the community and I’ve touched another human and reminded them ‘we are not alone.’  I talk to pharmacists too and write letters to government,  employers and schools and send all these missives signed with my name and all the long line of letters aftert my name that once meant so much to me.  Now I don’t know.  Being alone myself in what the Rolling Stones aptly called ‘living in a ghost town’ I’m finding a lot is being stripped away that hadn’t already fallen away.  

Adventures do that.  Challenges do that. Expose the essentials.  Each day when I’m not working, I’m walking the dog and breathing in the rich scents and joy of nature. We have a trail through the woods by the river. I’ve taken my dog, my camera and love to catch pictures of wood ducks and herons and song sparrows. The blossoms I shot months back have given forth fruits now. My dog has a heart murmur, congestive heart failure, coughs like a 2 pack a day smokers,  is blind and injured his back . We don’t walk fast. My back is sore most days as well.  My heart weary but  still good. I don’t know.  It’s what my patient called the ‘season of uncertainty’. Friends are ill and sometimes I learn someone has died. Our hospitals are full or nearly full. They never empty.  People with covid fall and recover but I’m sure it’s sheer terror. I’m still afraid of being sick. I avoid people ,especially young people and strangers. I see a friend or two. We’ve begun meeting again on weekends.  She is loving and comforts my dog.  We laugh. I love to hung. 

There’s war and rumours of war.  The lies and misinformation are ubiquitous. Mobs in terror roam the streets.  The media has failed everyone, clanging bells of partisan bias and propaganda.  The leadership has so often lost it’s direction. There’s untold deaths of old caused by lizard brains and heartless leaders. I’m protected here. The local government is showing surprising wisdom. The insanity is at a distance.  Some guy is dementing while another talks about his socks.  I think of times of George III and know that I’m in the middle of the likes of the Charge of the Light Brigade.  Chamberlain insists the communists are friends. Still there are equally beautiful and profound hero’s.  A little boy saved his sister from a dog attack. I saw the picture and read the story on Facebook.  I liked the mother elephant rescuing the baby elephant on Utube.  The donkey sanctuary always makes me smile.  I harken back to the times I was a child and my mom and dad and older brother were there to save me, mostly from myself.

Now I pray. My God, My God, why.......I begin.....then change to,  gratitude.  Jesus commanded ‘Do Not Be Afraid’.  I told my sailing friend ‘worrying is wicked’ . He laughs whenever we are in desperate times and asks, “are we wicked yet, Billy.” 

Thank you for this day, Lord. Thank you for the joy that comes with checking in. Thank you for my family and friends and colleagues. Thank you for the example of my courageous little dog.  Thank you that I can still be of service. Thank you for the good leadership. Thank you for technology and networks that allow me to reach out and still the fear in others. Thank you for nature. Thank you for breath.  Thank you God of Gods, Creator, Sustainer, Lover and Friend  Help me to be less afraid. May my faith grow stronger. May I know you more dearly.  Thank you for checking in.

  

Sunday Morning, Covid

I’m not going to church. Normally I would except Covid still haunts us.  I haven’t gone to the clinics except for brief appearances .I walk the dog. I do shopping quickly. I wear a mask. I am actually afraid of being in closed spaces with strangers. Even friends cause me a mild discomfort.  I am reminded of Paul Simon’s song, A Winter’s Day.  Laura visits. I have lovely convivial weekends with her and Gilbert. We talk, watch tv, eat meals together, share a bed. Then it’s the week again and work.I’m on the phone and in front of the computer 8 to 10 hours a day until Friday when the schedule changes a bit and the morning is more like being on call. It’s just keeping the methadone going.  Rote questions. Assurances.  It reminds me of general practice. Psychiatry, by contrast, the way my teachers taught me, has a complexity I have to be alert for,  in a prickly pear sort of way. 

In the evening I’m exhausted. I take my Nikon Cool Pix P 1000 camera on walks with Gilbert.  I like that my nephews are doing well. I saw Anna and the God Kids and they’re shooting up in size and their eyes are so much more alert and intelligent. 

I have old patients like old neighbours. We’ve known each other over 20 years. It astounds me sometimes to consider all those years and the crisis and trauma we have passed through.  I’m humbled by their thanks. I see new people as well.  Mostly I’m seeing new folk but the old patients cycle back and it’s astonishing how much time has passed.  

I have friends I’ve known 60 years and talking with them I feel like a kid again but wonder at the whole idea of time since we’ve changed but we’ve not changed.  .  I’m surprised that so many I know are in that over 50 zone while I continue to be in touch with younger folk, but they seem all like children to me and I’m afraid of being among aliens, people who don’t know the Beatles or the Kennedy Missile Crisis. 

I’m always surprised at the parts of me that others know. I’m this leathered up biker guy with the Harley, the white coated clinician with stethoscope around his neck, the masked surgeon or the Harris Tweed jacket and jeans consultant specialist, the cammo clad hunter, the survival jacket and khaki shorts sailor, or the scuba guy spear fishing.  I’m a bow hunter.  I’m the photographer with computer gear who once lived in dark rooms inhaling chemicals that dripped from my hanging pictures and negatives. . I’m carrying tools that define me. I’m living in Campers and RV’s having left the mansions and homesteads. Each incarnation lingers. 

I like the skirts and sandals. I like the feminine and sensitive. I seem be harkening back to the dancing days, a carefree time of the body, more hedonistic than spiritual, intellectual but always inquisitive. I wrote more then. I wrote about anima and animus. I’m weary of the burden of maleness. It’s likely with old age more estrogen is coursing through my system along with oxytocin and a variation on MAO that lessens my desire to defend and protect. All the women I’ve served and defended and protected and the media portrays us as the enemy.  

I cycle back to the false accusations and the bullying by psychopathic women and their mobs of injustice, lying to cover up their lack of competence. I’m weary with the tokenism and the demands of  the entitled insisting that I owe them. I loathe the marxist thugs with their fake intellectualism, the paranoid position of them and me. I want to walk down the streets in gossamer white clothing and sandals or canvas shorts and sailing vest. Instead today I feel like I need to wear body armour and would weapon up to face the criminals and activists but my government has disarmed me and has stabbed me in the back after decades of services. I empathize with the police and military and wonder why I served the elite by containing the dangerously insane and did my best to stop homicide and suicide and all the domestic violence since today the media and the mayors and the governors and my PM celebrate the violence.  

I look at the policemen and women and feel sorry for them tooled up with all that tack of daily work. The weight they carry on their belts and the heavy vests they wear are just part of the toughness of their jobs. My back hurts from having a spine. I’m thankful today I sit in sarong before a computer unhampered by restrictive clothing. I long for the world of Heinlein when we’ d all ‘grok’ it. But here we are devolving or at least the media is, back to our feral roots. 

It has been fun this weekend watching old Star Wars movies with Laura.   Always reminds me to look to the STARS. NASA was such a meataphor for my growing up and my life of exploration. I remember medicine as always being ‘interesting and exciting”.  I’ve enjoyed reading Science and Nature Magazine, Lancet and the NEJM remembering how for decades I read them weekly. I had a subscription when I was at the university decades back. Then I read the Economist and  psychiatry reading took precedence . I ‘d studied all the medicine of family practice and surgery, then read all the texts of community medicine then the greats of psychiatry and neuroscience. For decades I never listened to the radio but always listened to medical grand rounds from around the world on cassettes and CD’s. I loved long drives with coffee and education . Then I returned from psychotherapeutics and hypnosis to psychopharmacology and addiction.  More diplomas, more classrooms and more exam and added on a decade of doing theological studies and nights upon nights at the universities.   

We’ve watched the Prequels of Star Wars and somehow that brought back the dreams of space exploration, the countless science fiction books I’d read as a pre teen and teen. I loved anthropology too then and my favourite teen science fiction was a blue suited couple who searched for old technology of ancient races.  The cover course that first year of college,  I was touched most by was biology even though  I was in arts and was going to be a playwright. Now I’m still interested in writing and acting and all the world of multiple expressions and multiple personalities. The parts we played.  When I write stories I am the characters. I remember Dickens wearing props to help him stay in character, a scarf for a character, a hat for another.    

Laura and I then watched Mel Gibson, one of my all time favourite actors and directors.   I loved his role as a retired policeman with the beautiful daughter in an amazing script with twists and turns and bad guys all set against the backdrop of New Orleans hurricane.   “Force of Nature” movie  night with Me & Ed’s Godfather Pizza and Laura and Gilbert. A wonderful evening.  Such a great movie! Such good company.

SiOnyx Aurora Pro is a color night vision scope. I bought my first night vision equipment when the Russian Military scope became available.  It was the green head gear which I wore backwoods hunting and could see how it would allow me to shoot game or people at night because the movement was readily available as blobs. But there was little acuity. I had night vision scopes for off shore sailing and it was helpful in identifying ships. I saw one freighter come down on me with the pilot asleep in his command chair. That certainly increased my efforts to get out of his track. He’d not responded to my VHF calls. The night vision scope certainly clarified the problem, albeit too close for comfort. 

The SiOnyx Aurora Pro is the best available to date. I discussed it with my tech savy astronomer, photographer, cinematographer,  engineer nephew and was delighted to learn he’d been following the scientific sensor development.  I’m glad I have it for wilderness camping, hunting and sailing. It’s also a video and still camera which will give Graeme joy when he gets his but I confess I’m not as excited by those aspects as the expansion of my awareness. I fell in love with microscopes and binoculars as a kid and the experience never dulls.  

Now I’m wondering if I should wear a dress to my hair appointment. Do not go gentle into that still night! Rage. Rage. Against the dying of the light!. I have all the girl “friends’ who are having fun in their older age and the guys more often are on the couch. Thankfully my motorcycle and RV friends are still into adventure and exploration.  But my body hurts too  I don’t judge my older friends who’d rather be on the couch than wearing high heels. It’s been years since I wore high heels. Laura has ordered some wedgies.  She’s 4 foot 11 inches so when age made high heels more difficult for her she was vertically challenged even more.  At 6 feet wearing high heels gave me that stork like appearance of ichibod crane in drag.  The couch and hot tub and bed all have their immense appeal for me today. I take kindness wherever I can find it.   Yet I delight in the hair appointment and pedicures too.  I”d get more tattoos if I didn’t have to avoid water for a week. Something about art and the feminine.  If I was independently wealthy in the age of  covid , I’d garden and raise donkeys on a converted air craft carrier with space travel conversion that I mostly anchored off my favourite tropical island. 

It’s as new day and I’m very grateful. Yesterday was rainy and moody. The Service Department at Holeshot Motorsports were dishonest and incompetent and the day which was just supposed to be picking up a motorcycle devolved down to male to male confrontation because they had told me to pick up my bike and I’d arrived and it wasn’t ready and in that pathetic way they tried to accuse me of not having been called to come in when I was. I was put out and they played the victim. Even blaming me for being upset in that increasingly common borderline and narcissistic gas lighting defence.  Laura was upset because she was put out and I just felt castrastrated and demasculinized ,because all the normal male things I’d do, like punch the likely alcoholic little power administrator in the nose, I’d let go of 50 years ago. I’ve spent a life being civilized and obeying the law and following the rules. When I was a young I was adept in defence and martial arts, physically fighting off gangs in wayward places, rescuing damsels in distress, being stabbed for my efforts and shot at too many times.   Now the police which I used to love, areno longer protecting me, themselves increasingly taking early retirement and all working to ‘rule’ due to the the corruption of the government.  The RCMP, our national police are beneath an unethical PM, corrupt to the core, criminally servicing himself and his family with characteristic eastern Canada cronyism, while  filling our streets with ISIS and Communist Chinese, taking away our guns and making it increasingly illegal for us to protect our lives, our property, our loved ones.   I was at a point where I thought I could rest on my laurels, have a massage and bubble bath, but here were men like this bullying me and frankly I ‘m weary of that. I know I stand up to such guys physically over and over again when they did their ‘Mano or mano’ cocks displays and 99% of the time backed down without me having to kick them in the head.   But I’m too old today and don’t have any investment in that silliness. I think at times now I wasted my life being a doctor as serving as it was.   As a guy I should have left medicine and everything else to the girls while I studied law and weapons because that’s all that counts today, where the guys with money have men with guns and daily strip all the rest of the men of everything while the women lose the battle. I used to say Churchill beat Hitler but Eva Brawn beat Mrs Churchill. The democrat female mayors and governors all let the bullies rage for weeks and days. More percentage of women voted for Trudeau and like central socialist government  if the person in charge is pretty. My gay friends seem like them to not know the history of communism and dictatorships.  Ironically these friends allign with political parties here who allign with African and Middle eastern countries, thoroughly into 19th century war and business male modes , with gays denounced and stripped.   Meanwhile I love the conservative women and admire them and have always known the greatest female doctors, half my class being women and outstanding.  I have this broad network of relationships, love the tension of opposites, stand in the middle and watch extremists all around me believe they are tolerant and understanding, and middle of the road.  

So the whole area of race and gender has distracted the world from colonization of Mars and the development of a personal Harley hover craft for me. Drones are fine but I’d like to be able to fly like I ride my Harley. Maybe I’d like a skirt and scooter. It a changing thing. I loved being in Rome with Laura on the back of the Vespa touring churches .I love holy places.  I am afraid today of disease and war and my declining physical capability. I think like my friends of moving to the US where there are so many states which still have freedoms as Canada goes quickly the way of Venezuela.  I miss freedom of speech and the other freedoms. Every time I speak now and when I write I know that someone is offended. The offended are always like predators looking for their next victim. Like zombies running in mob masses with the screams . ANTIFA and the Marxist BLM and the Jihadi’s.  I think of myself as gender fluid and can’t see why so many creative people have been so deluded by the marketing. It’s right out of the Goebbels , Reich Minister of propaganda play book. It’s the same book Lenin and Trotsky used. All they do is sell ‘hate’ while claiming to be against hate. The same ‘useful idiots’ were fooled by the ‘Peacemissile’ in the omnibus bills. I’m jaded by it all

I like to light incense and remember patoula oil haze,youth and the gorgeous half naked women of the era of peace,  dance and theatre.  Free love. We said .  And Bobby Magee , Freedom’s just another world for nothing left to lose’.  We were poor and laughed and our parents had worked hard through the fifties after the wars of the 40’s and here we were hippies, long hair and girlish ways making fun of soldiers which our fathers and grandfathers had been. Gender .  Amazon women today , a minority.  

Feminism -imitation of men and denigration of mothers celebrfating abortion,  the great killing. War on babies. What Cowards! 

I am here still convincing people to not kill themselves, walking them back from the edge, going down worm holes of the mind to bring them back.  Giving them drugs that don’t kill them. Telling them they aren’t the enemy.

I’m going to have another cup of coffee. I roasted some green beans yesterday and it’s so tasty made right after I grind it.  Decadent.

Thank you Lord for all the ‘stuff’ of my existence today, the friends and family, the memories and the weekends. Thank you for Gilbert and help him live despite his heart and lung disease.  Please keep my family and friends safe and help me to be more sensitive and caring and capable.  Help us all get beyond Covid safely and don’t let the Communist Chinese win this dirty covert war  trick.And whatever conspiracy theory is the flavour of the month, you are in charge Lord, and may I always find your loving face in the peek a boo of existence.  

Everybody’s got a somebody done me wrong story

Everybody’s got a somebody done me wrong story

Everybody has somebody to blame for their faults

Everybody claims they’ve a monopoly on suffering

Everyone says their pain is worst.

Everyone wants their time in the limelight

No one wants to step down from the Speaker’s box

Everybody wants the Camera on them and them alone

I just want to find my way back home.

Crying in obscurity

Calling out for the Maker of All

Twisting my mind away from seeing only negatives

Working all day to walk upright rather than just slither along

I’m an insect. I’m insentient. I’m weary and utterly bored

The morning light is a special time of hope and possibility

But I’m jaded, defeated,  wounded and struggling to hold on

I’m afraid, embarrassed,  ashamed and humiliated

But I’ll put on a happy face, wipe my own ass 

And be thankful for that. 

Hallelujah. A new day has dawned. 

Princeton, proto retirement

It’s another do nothing day in the Princeton Municipal RV park by the Silmilkameen River  with Laura and Gilbert.  I don’t know what I would do without Laura. She tells me what to do.  If I’m not serving Gilbert or her I’m fairly lost.  I’m back to reading a western. I’ve been reading Nicholas Wade’s , A troublesome inheritance but keep falling asleep at then end of every chapter. Then I go back to  westerns I stay awake  half the night reading them.

The pattern which I suspect won’t change when I retire is : get up ,walk the dog, make coffee, read facebook, make Laura coffee, talk about the neighbours, scan the weather. The big event is getting Gilbert to take his heart medications.  We’re down to rolling it in roast beef slices and still he spits out the pill at times.  When that’s done I’m exhausted and need more coffee, read more facebook and argue politics with some stranger whose likely retired and doing the same thing. I feel irrelevant. The world happens and I’m moved along by the glacier of elite world politics.   Laura writes a list of things she wants. Today I get to fetch bread ,  milk, cheese and fresh roast beef for the dog.   

Yesterday I rode the KTM motorcycle out to the woods with the new Chiappa Double Badger and the Ruger 30:06. Laura was glad to be rid of me. She does her crosswords, reads, scans facebooks, watches the neighbours and talks with her children and relatives.  She’s content.  I’m generally restless and was talking of climbing Kilimanjaro the other day. She doesn’t even think about such things.  I shot a couple of dozen rounds with the 30:06 180 grain 50 yards getting nice groupings around the bullseye.  Every shot would have killed the big game. Most of my shots over the years have been around 50 yards but I did shoot a deer at 600 yards, and couple of moose at 300 yards. I tried out the Chiappa and despite the red dot sites was all over the place at 50 yards, high, maybe the wind. I moved closer to the 25 yard range where I usually shoot grouse and had  nice groupings. The 20 guage slugs hit in the black and if they were bird shot would have taken out the grouse or rabbit too but I’ve not figured out how to get bulleyes out of that barrel yet.  

I had muskoil mosquito repellant so offended MLM, mosquitoes lives matter.  It was a lovely sunny day. After feeling good about being a straight shooter and some out of season practice I packed up and rode the motorcycle up the logging roads. I spooked a deer and saw a rabbit I took a picture of.  It was a great hard ride on gravel roads with spectacular vistas. I’m often here in the fall so it’s a treat to see it in spring.  It takes a lot of upper body strength handling the deep logging truck grooves here and there.  It also became really chilly in the high mountain country especially as the evening came on . I was just wearing a denim jacket and jeans, thankful for my leather gloves.  I always wear a helmet despite the depreciation on what it protects.

I was glad to get home.  Laura immediately told me the grey tank was full. We’d emptied the tanks in the morning, the camp having a central Sani dump.  This time rather than taking the truck there I brought the honey pot here and unloaded 20 gallons of grey water before taking it back. I bought a bunch of wood too and started a fire.  I put the potatoes on with chopped carrots to boil and after a bit of time took out the steaks and got them going on the barbecue. It’s always a matter of timing still decades of cheffing later.  With sour cream and butter and Coca Cola for drinks it was  a meal made in heaven for the outdoors.  I’ve been enjoying peppermint chocolate bars for dessert and drinking mint tea after dinner. Laura’s enjoyed the Hagen Daz ice cream bars.   Laura went back to reading her Michael Connelly while I returned to Facebook looking for a meaningful political argument with a computer generated political robotron. 

On FB I loved watching Kayleigh make toast of some journalists who really seem to have difficulty holding spit in their mouths.  Being an authority on world politics after driving around the backwoods on a motorcycle I commented on world affairs with aplomb. No doubt the people I talked to, most of us are now old, did even less than I did in their day. Some of my favourite political pundits are avid gardeners. I’ve at least been working till this 2 week decline. I understand how so many people who retire end up in drugs and alcohol, at gambling casinos and brothels with their bottles of viagra.  I depend on Laura with her requests for bread and cheese to keep me sane with purpose.

I remember 2 month vacations in the summer from school and being thankful to return to school because generating ideas of what to do each day on your own can be wearying. If I wasn’t working I’d end up in a library somewhere or have chapters spread out all over the floor and write the great Canadian novel. I’ve several books in outline to do but they are major projects and not something I’ve even considered this 2 week vacation. It’s been literally years since I’ve had 2 weeks of free unscheduled time in a decade or so. Normally I go to a conference for a week and extend it for a week to sight see.  Otherwise I’m on pilgrimage like Ethiopia, Israel, Rome or hunting with actual goals.  Now I’m just relaxing. I once did this on a beach and an ex wife complained that I didn’t ‘get ‘ the idea of ‘sun bathing’.  That’s when I learned to sail off the coast of Yucatan leaving her on the beach.  So much for relaxing.

Fortunately today I’m not nearly as inadequate as I was when younger. I used to have these really steep learning curves like blue water navigation, white water canoeing, black diamond skiing, winter camping. Each of these skills was a whole focussed activity with lots of pressure. Like learning guitar and then playing in a blues band trying to stay sober while people kept handing me shooters.  I’m resting on my laurels now. Last week I assembled the pontoon boat and fished without success but I did it all by the book.  I could have hunted a bear last week but I’m finding myself lazier each year. I have actually been enjoying this doing nothing.  Thankfully Laura has given my day meaning and focus with the request for bread and cheese and milk. I’ll walk the dog of course. Gilbert’s demands are always for ball throwing and walking and napping. He’s insatiable that way. 

Meanwhile I’m praying and loving nature.  

In a few days I’ll be back to being useful and I’ll have to admit this holiday has been recuperative. I don’t have a clue what time it is and I’m not even fretting about a myriad of things I’ve yet to do. I’m pretty sure I can handle riding the motorcycle into town and buying bread. I could go to backwoods on the motorcycle again or go flying fishing. I could go golfing. But I really like the idea of buying bread and cheese and milk for Laura.  It’s deeply meaningful and purposeful.  I have to buy more roast beef for my dog.  

Thank you Lord for this wonderful blank slate of a day and the unscheduled time.  

Princeton Vacation, Facebook news, Stranger than fiction, Weather reports,

It’s hard to keep track of the ancient and modern Gods with so much mythology and fake news.  Obama and Trudeau gave China money to make the Wuhan lab according to Macron’s plans.  The Batlady killed the Bat Girl testing the SinoCan vaccine on the Covid 19 virus which was leaked to destroy the economy of the west so Xi Lingping could foreclose on all the money he leant investors by keeping the Communist Chinese people as veritable slaves.

Meanwhile George Soros whose history is destroying economies to bet on the competitor to make stock exchange gambling millions has invested in Yen and pulled all his money out of the Dollar economy. He backs the Marxist Black Lives Matter and Nazi ANTIFA to create economic chaos while Democrat leaders to win the election play fiddles and watch the US burn hoping the voters will blame the Republicans who have been fighting a war on two fronts. 

The Communist Chinese have invaded Hong Kong, India and are doing war exercises to invade Taiwan. Iran , their ally is threatening to nuke Israel while denying they have nukes.  Communist China has threatened to cut off pharmaceuticals to India and the west. Kennedy who fought communism is watching from his grave while all the communist playbook stated by Kruschev is being played out.  Rioters and looters wear Che shirts and call for the killing of police.  

Trudeau gives money only to those who vote for him and to Isis terrorists.  He wants the wise to shut up and die. The nearly extinct Canada goose is making a come back and there is hope for the Beaver.  Trudeau continues with his totalitarian plans to disarm citizens outlawing parliament. With freedom of speech gone and CBC ,the China Daily or New Pravda, Trudeau makes daily appearances when his staff can straighten him up enough from whatever party goes on in his palatial basement. Some days he looks worse than the DTES junkies being killed by hundreds a day overdoses by Communist Chinese Military fentanyl.  

Japan has bought islands in the China sea where Communist China has anchored two air craft carriers and continues to attack Vietnam. African black babies are facing starvation  by the millions as BLM continues to disrupt the food supply chains destroying black business indiscriminately.

I”m here on vacation only getting news from what Zuckerberg allows.  Most truth is now banned. I look at it all like ancient Greeks looking at the skies for signs and discussing the sexual habits of Gods. All the leaders, except Trump and Pence, went to parties on Epstein’s private island. Paterson’s fiction about New York cannibalism is actually taking place in Hollywood where jaded drug and alcohol addicted wealthy celebrities import babies for hoer d’oeves between lecturing the rest of the world on morality. 

The Climate Change Doomsday Cult have overnight switched to the Covid 19 Doomsday cult.  

I listen to Schizophrenics for a living and none of them are as zany as Ottawa right now. Freud eventually said ‘maybe the paranoids’ are right. Leonard Cohen wrote ‘there is a war ....a war between the odd and the even.’ 

I’ve been passing time reading westerns and science fiction, walking the dog, riding my KTM motorcycle in the rain in the backwoods and into town. I’ve shot targets and might again today.  There’s something satisfying in accuracy,  simplicity and meritocracy.  There’s not a lot of appreciation for straight shooters anymore.  You can talk all you want but it’s not a bull’s eye unless it’s a bull’s eye. I’m pleased with the groupings.

I’ve been on holiday long enough that I’m looking forward to return, mostly for laundry, mostly for a different routine. It’s been a great vacation when I’m ready to go back to work.  This experience of weather, rain, and chill and hot sun, daily fluctuations is something. I miss my womb like experience lying on my couch.  

Gilbert is a joy. Laura has been easy company and beautiful.  I love this camper but I’d rather be travelling through Arizona or New Mexico. I’m ready for dry sunshine. I get that way every year in the rain forest of BC.  I”m short on hot.  We had some great sunny days last week but this week it’s been a bit weak.  Laura has been reading the weather. I remember my grandfather explaining things by the weather report.  All the farmers and ranchers talked about the weather.  I’m doing that now.

I made bacon sandwiches for Laura first thing in the morning.  Now I’ve had coffee and will go back to more.  It’s a sort of “turn down day. Nothing on my mind’ and I ‘dig it the most.”
All the drama is at a distance. The Gods are crazy in their orgies. Nothing happening here locally. 

We’ve taken to watching our neighbours here. A woman came in last night and set up a huge tent in the pouring rain taking a couple of hours to do it. She just has her car. This morning she’s walking about in pj bottoms and sweater. All night she was shouting into her cellular phone. We’ve been speculating about her story.  You know you’ve had a great holiday when your mind becomes mush. 

Thank you God. 

Princeton Vacation: Canada Day

I was born in Canada. My parents were too.  My great grand parents came to Canada a generation before but family have been in Canada and the United States for over a hundred years.  I don’t say I’m Irish or Scottish Canadian. I’ve just thought of myself as Canadian.  

My father served in WWII with the RCAF. When he married my mom they lived with her parents for some years saving to put a down payment on a house.  My brother came before me.  I remember their first house. They rented part of it out to a single working man.   There was no health care and or pensions or welfare. When I was bit by a rabid dog everyone was worried.  My treatment and care was expensive by the standards of the day. Same as the cost for me stepping on a rusty nail that went through my foot. 

We ate Sunday dinner with my mom’s parents.  We attended the Baptist Church too.  That’s where I met black people. My father’s brother married Annie who was Cree. That’s how I played with Métis kids growing up.  

We moved to Winnipeg when I was young. That’s when I met my two friends, Kirk and Garth.  The Cold War and the Kennedy Missile Crisis were frightening.  We had one of the first TV’s, my mom won it in a draw, and watched hockey with neighbours. Playing hockey was Canadian.  In the summer we played baseball.  

We all loved Mr. Diefenbaker because he loved all of Canada not just the east.  We always camped in tents and went fishing in the summer. Dad took us on long drives on his 2 week summer holidays, once to the Pacific Coast and another time to the Atlantic Coast.  My mother’s aunt visited us from Toronto. She’d been the assistant to Canada’s Ambassador during the War and travelled all over the world sending us souvenirs. I especially loved the Arabian head dress which I wore as a Shepherd in the church Christmas play.

Other than the thought of being blown to smithereens by nuclear weapons, growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s was pretty neat.  My Jewish friend showed me the sign at the country club which said “No dogs. No Jews”.  I didn’t have any yellow friends till I was older. My father liked smorgasbord and eventually met a Fillipino couple who’d Mom and Dad would go to smorgasbord with.  We did know a Japanese fellow and later I’d know an ex Nazi German who told us with tears in his eyes that he’d had to fight the Russians because the government said they’d kill his wife and child. His wife was crying at the time and that’s all they ever talked about the war.

I remember singing the Canadian anthem and didn’t like much when they changed the flag.  I liked blue and when they took away the blue it seemed wrong. Also the maple leaf was only in the east and the red colour was harsh.  I remember Canada dividing east and west that year and feeling like a second class citizen.  The railway and Gordon Lightfoots song, Canadian Trilogy had brought us all together like 1967.  I  loved seeing the geodesic dome at the World Fair in Canada.  

We’d seen alien spaceships in the wilderness , watching saucers through binoculars.  Then we’d hear that the government said it was weather phenomena. Dad laughed at that.  He and his chemist friend from the university said, “No weather phenomena can make a ship go at that speed and change direction at 90degreess. “

We loved Star Trek and look forward to coming home after school and watching it. Mom made us grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and Dad liked meat and potatoes for dinner. We all loved orio cookies .She gardened and kept the bird feeder and wrote columns on community news for the newspaper. She talked on the wall phone a lot to collect information for her articles. We competed in the horticultural shows with the flowers she taught us to grow. We visited Granddad’s ranch in the north some summer’s too.  My uncle was a real cowboy. I rode horse with him.  In the fall we hunted.  Mostly ducks. Mom wouldn’t let Dad take me deer hunting.  I remember him hanging deer in the basement where he had his shop skinning the deer and Mom and him butchering the deer on the kitchen table.  

As kids we laughed at Bill Cosby records. Music became important with the arrival of the Beatles. Girls were the most beautiful in Canada. I loved the Scandinavian girls in bikinis at the Lake Winnipeg beaches. That’s when Beach Boy songs became popular. 

We celebrated Christmas with a Christmas tree and gifts and tobogganing and hot chocolate. We loved maple syrup on our pancakes. I don’t remember Easter much except that the ladies wore exotic hats in church and we all sang happy hymns. Mom had taught me to pray on our  knees by the side of the bed when I was a little child. We always had a dog who Dad would sneak scraps of food under the table. 

In the fall we’d drive out to the country and visit the towns where the communities had fowl suppers. My brother Ron and I would stuff ourselves on turkey and dad would talk hog prices with the men.  CJOB radio station always reported on the grain and hog prices each day.  We shopped at Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay.  Eventually I’d join the YMCA. At school I’d play volleyball.  Later I’d join the Manitoba Theatre School.  The Vietnam War was frightening. We thought it would spread.  Jon Cowtan taught me guitar when I was doing Kitchen work with him at a summer camp.  My first song was draft dodger’s rag. It was funny.  I wrote love poetry mostly and wanted to be a writer. As a child Mom had taken my brother and me to the library every week and we’d borrowed three  books we’d read each week. I loved reading and learning.  

I’d fall in love, have sex and get my first broken heart.  We’d go snow shoeing in winter and canoeing in summer.  We hired the Guess Who for my high school dance for $500 when I was on the Student Council. 

I’d eventually get kicked out of school, finish somehow, get into a band, do drugs, have more sex, crash, come home. My parents loved me. My older brother took care of me.  I studied and read philosophy, history and theology , writing poetry all the time. I was a dancer and an actor, got married, then I left for Europe.  I came back to Canada and liked that Canada was clean.  I loved the wilderness. Everything human made in Canada seemed  small and new in this vast country.   Europe was old. Buildings were old and people were everywhere with very little country left.  I loved the architecture there though.  Our biggest building in Winnipeg was the Richardson Building. My aunt Sally liked to take us for dinner at the restaurant at the top of the CN Tower  when we stayed with her in Toronto.  I loved the sprawl and mess of  Europe and Northern Africa when I bicycled across Eruope in my early 20’s and visited Morocco. The history and quaintness and different distinct cultures  were so intriguing. 

I was so glad to come back to Canada where there was opportunity. Everything in Europe was fixed.  People didn’t have the choices we had.  I loved freedom.  I loved that I could go to university on scholarship and be rewarded by hard work. It seemed in Europe it was all about who your parents were and the class system was so powerful everywhere. 

In Canada we had freedom. I loved the meritocracy of Canada.That was before the welfare system. I met Pierre Trudeau and liked him as a kid. I didn’t know he was a Nazi communist back then.  He just seemed ‘cool’.  The suits and red carnation got me.  I was meeting a lot of White Russians who’d escaped from Communism and had so many of their family killed.  I’d be a liberal for 20 years, meeting Chrétien and Turner too.  I thought of Canada as enlightened. I’d loved Pearson and his worldliness and felt after I returned from Europe that the west was kind of provincial. 

My heart was broken again and I left the arts and writing for medicine and service.  Learning sciences was a different vision and I became fascinated by Canada’s scientific advances, the CANDU reactor, the Avro Jet, the Heart Surgery.  I just lived in Canadian cities and whenever I could took off for the weekends to go hiking and camping. I’d eventually make my own igloos in the north and sleep in them.  That’s when I was a fly in doctor in the north after I’d graduated and left surgery for country medicine because that’s where the greatest need was.  We’d vacation in Mexico back then, exploring the Minoan and Aztec ruins and lying on the beach.  

I’ve never thought I was anything but a Canadian. Then Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister and made Canada politically everything I abhorred.  I never wanted to live in a totalitarian country. I had fought censorship and now was faced with the loss of freedom of speech. Even comics are charged for telling jokes. Everything not liberal is racist or hate speech.   I’ve  continued to travel around the world and people smirked and told me jokes about our Canadian Prime Minister.   I’d been so proud to be Canadian when I’d travelled before but now we are a joke internationally.  Not that relevant either, despite the grandiosity of Ottawa. The world had become much more sophisticated while Canada had become much smaller ,outdated and provincial.  

Now we’re in the midst of Covid 19 and I’m very thankful to be in British Columbia where UBC, Dr. Bonnie Henry, Mr. Dix and Mr. Horgan make me proud to be Canadian. But mostly I’m British Columbian today. There’s been so much divide and conquer I can’t feel much of the old Deifenbaker, Canada, One Country.  Trudeau calls himself .a transnational and loves the UN One World Order.  There’s nothing there Canadian.  He has no pride of country like I did.   In fact, he’s anti Canada, as far as I can tell. The whole Idea of an enlightened country which loved the north , embraced freedom and wilderness as distinctively Canadian has been lost. Increasingly I meet immigrants who have never been out of the parking lot cities. Vancouver may as well be San Francisco or Mexico City.  Winnipeg downtown may as well be Tel Aviv.  Cities are not countries. Cities are human habitats and they look all the same like Walmarts and Canadian Tires.  Big shopping malls with living quarters. Istanbul only has one block of park and except for different monuments seems similiar to Delli.   Now so many Canadians live in a Canadian City and they don’t holiday in Canada or know Canada as a country, but every year go back to some city in  China, India, Somalia, or the Middle East. They don’t call themselves Canadian either, but Indo Canadian or Chinese Canadian or Persian Canadian or French Canadian .  At least I meet their children out in the woods or in the north. The natives call me a squatter and want to turn Canada into what became of South Africa which kills whites weekly claiming that’s progress.  I hope not. 

What made Canada distinctive was the wilderness and the outdoors. We didn’t hide inside and people didn’t live out their lives in their mother’s basement or in high rise appartments like Hong Kong.  Canadians camped and hiked and knew the land. Fewer and fewer people I know have been to the north or explored the Maritimes , been to Niagara Falls or visited the St. Lawrence or the Prairies. I’ve been to every province but the new Nunavut and Newfoundland.  

Canada somehow became Montreal/ Toronto when I was living overseas or working in the States.  Overnight the rest of Canada disappeared like England disappeared one day when London became a megalopolis. 

Now Canada is a city, Montreal and Toronto no different from London, New York, or LA.  Canada for me was the Great Lakes and the Rockies. It was sailing and hiking and playing hockey and snowmobiling in northern Manitoba,  motorcycling Duffy Lake road, skiing Whistler, cross country skiing in the Yukon, swimming in Lake of the Woods, eating lobster in Nova Scotia, fishing pickerel in Loyalist Cove.  It was riding horses in Saskatchewan. It was country. It was the Calgary Stampede and the Maple Syrup festival in Quebec and tales of Coer de Bois in St. Boniface.  It was distinctive and unique as only the outdoors can be.  It was God’s country and I was so grateful and thankful to be Canadian and grow up Canadian.  

It’s Canada Day.  I’ve a wealth of wonderful memories and bittersweet thoughts of my country today The people have changed and the politics have gone down the tube. The corruption seems worse but then we were once famous as booze runners and then as pot sellers. We’ve always been gun runners.  I”m outside today enjoying being beside a mountain stream.  Canada is still God’s country to me even though I believe the government has gone to the devil. I can’t wait till it finds it’s way back home because I’ve got nowhere else to go.