Breaking My Threshold

You know, Gentle Reader, I think it was shortly after the first young person gave up their seat for me on the bus some five or six years ago that I began to think of myself as old, or aged, or aging, or getting there, or that I'd better get my ducks in a row because I'm not going to live forever.  My feelings were understandably mixed.  I wasn't that old, or I didn't feel that old.  On the other hand I have never much enjoyed having to stand on the bus though I have always been among the first to offer my seat to a senior or a person with a visible disability, or, what the hell?, anyone who looks really tired, or a woman wearing ridiculously high heels, or a pregnant woman or a young father carrying a child.  It still feels strange being on the receiving end, and generally anyone near my age or a bit older to whom I've offered my seat has often seemed a bit insulted and generally insisted that I remain where I am please and thank you.  I wondered at first if I should feel a bit insulted, but I really have little control over how others are going to perceive my age and I'm not about to go under the scalpel since I feel quite proud of looking my age, no matter what I might think of anyone who doesn't guess me to be at least five years younger.  I do like to encourage good habits in young people, and besides, since they are gracious enough to offer me a seat I really don't want to insult them by refusing.  Accepting kindness is in itself a kindness.  It's also excellent role-modelling for some of those narcissistic young douchebags who take up courtesy seats and feign blindness whenever someone who really needs them more than they do board the bus.

This acceptance of kindness has also had a couple of drawbacks.  For a while I was acquiring a sense of entitlement.  C'mon you guys, I'm almost old enough to be your grandpa.  Get up off your selfish lazy ass already.  I have made a huge effort to get over this attitude, and now if it's standing room only I make an effort not to look for healthy young bodies occupying seats that would be better suited to someone my age.  Also, given that I still hike between five and ten miles every day, it is more than a little likely that my legs are probably stronger than theirs.

I have also been having to reconsider how much exercise I should be getting.  I used to be a walker without limits and when I was younger it was not uncommon for me to cover between fifteen and twenty miles a day.  Things have changed since then.  For one thing I rarely do morning and evening walks any more, not because of my age, but because I live downtown and it isn't always nice to be outside, if you catch my drift.   Because of the nature of my work, arriving on time has become also expedient, which means that if I can walk partway between appointments with clients I will do so, but I can't do as much as I used to.  I have also become more disciplined and somewhat stuck in a routine that demands that I be home no later than five thirty in the afternoon if I want to get everything done that needs to be done: the day's paperwork, making and eating a nutritionally balanced dinner, cleaning up afterward, checking and writing emails, writing this bloody blog, listening to interesting and informative things on the CBC, seeing something on Youtube in Spanish to help maintain my language skills, time to rest and relax, work on a painting, time for prayer and devotional reading, reading for a while then getting to sleep hopefully before ten thirty.  That's a lot to fit in, but this kind of compressed routine is essential for keeping my life, soul and mind in good working order.

I also found myself by default becoming a bit lazier.  Having learned about the ten thousand step rule, I concluded that I need only to walk five miles a day in order to maintain optimum health and fitness.  I also came to rationalize that since others perceive me as old that I'd might as well accept it and buy into the same perception myself.  This has been my big fatal error.  Assuming that this is in the best interests of my health and respecting my allegedly increasing frailty I have found myself doing just the bare minimum to stay active and healthy while overindulging in the wrong foods.  When  I returned from Colombia one month ago I found that I had lost at least five pounds, from walking everywhere and cutting back on comfort food (that still didn't stop me from polishing off three jars of Nutella, and I still lost weight believe it or not!).  I resumed my routine of walking a little more than five miles every day and suddenly I was back to consuming the worst comfort foods (in my case, cheese, jam and chocolate in any form).  I actually did enjoy the same treats while in Colombia but I was eating a lot less.  So, in the last week I have been cutting back on the comforts, amping up the exercise and, behold, I have lost two of the three pounds that I gained back.

Today I took things a step further (please forgive the pun, GR) and I added three extra miles to my Saturday hiking routine.  Usually I take the bus to Shaughnessy Heights at around eleven in the morning, then I walk three miles along Angus Drive, an incredibly beautiful street with well-appointed mansions, towering trees and gardens.  I end up at a café where I pass one to two hours working on a drawing.  Then, between one thirty and two thirty I walk back, covering an extra mile, ending up at a budget supermarket, No Frills (yes that is their real name) to pick up some groceries then return home on the next bus.  Today, I decided, to hell with being sixty, I am walking the whole distance.  I walked from my apartment the full five miles (8.5 kilometres) to the coffee shop.  Then, after walking to No Frills, I walked all the way home over the bridge.  I do not feel tired or weak.  I even feel like taking a stroll after dinner.  Age be damned.

Impaired Walking, Or, Breathing While Stupid

It happened again.  She was headed straight towards me, completely unaware of the coming collision.  Her eyes were fixated on the tiny little screen in her hand.  I was in full defiance mode.  I was not going to budge or swerve neither left or right to enable her stupid behaviour.  If she didn't have the good common sense to look up from her precious phone before walking right into me it would be her own bloody fault.  Being a nice polite Canadian, of course I would apologize profusely just as if she had just trampled on my foot.  Then she did look up at me.  I could see the whites of her eyes and just in time she dodged to my left.  I simply shook my head and rolled my eyes.  Sometimes I will chime out a very cheery "Good morning!" even if it's already four-thirty in the afternoon.  In my more churlish moments they will be treated to a tart "Wake up!"

I'm not intentionally mean, or well, maybe not always, but to everything there is a limit.  The sidewalks and the crosswalks are all crammed with people fastened to their phones.  They seem completely unaware of their surroundings and frankly I am concerned about their safety and wellbeing.  They are the Breathing While Stupid.

I often wonder just what they would be looking at on their tiny little screens that would be so fascinating.  Are they doing emails?  Are they updating their Facebook status?  Texting?  Trolling the Internet?  Tweeting?  Looking at Porn?  There are so many interesting things and people happening in our immediate surroundings.  Why this great urge to escape?

I can think of three distinct occasions where I have seen folks on their phones, all of them young men, two of them wearing sandals without socks (at least they have good fashion sense) walking right into dog shit without even noticing.  One of them actually deserved it.  His Dalmatian had just left a brown steaming offering on the pavement and his human was so unaware of the situation that he didn't even appear to notice where he had stepped.  Then there was the fellow to whom I gave very good advance warning.  He looked up, grunted "Huh?" and in went his delicate bare little toes.  More recently, just after I'd returned from a month in Colombia and a month of speaking exclusively Spanish I yelled out "Cuidado!" instead of "Look out!" to another gormless young douche and of course it was too late, but at least I meant well.

We are becoming so wired to our tech toys that we are gradually forgetting that we are human beings living among other human beings.  Many of us are increasingly depriving ourselves from the simple every day human contact that makes life bearable and more and more are becoming aware of this and are actually trying to do something to have face to face contact with other humans, be it a supermarket cashier, a waiter, a barista, the person standing nearby waiting for the light to change.  This is how we are evolutionarily wired, not to connect to machines but to other human beings and by letting the tech companies lure us into addictive relationships to their products our most essential sense of humanity is being impacted and compromised.

Even on the radio this afternoon I listened to the guest host on the CBC Radio One program On The Coast while she interviewed a prominent tech geek.  She admitted to having various instruments of isolation: a tablet, phone, something else.  She no longer uses a desktop (who does?) and dissed the humble laptop as yesterday's news.  Another i junkie.  Like so many others with disposable income, spending on the latest device, making the medium vastly more important than the message.  Oh, that's right, the medium IS the message.  Thank you Mr. McLuhan.

I have two tech devices.  One is a five year old laptop that still serves me faithfully.  The other is a tech antique: a flip phone.  That's right, Gentle Reader, this is my confession to you and the world.  I use a flip phone.  I carry it with me everywhere.  It also helps me tell the time.  It isn't mine.  It is my work phone.  As long as I can still hold out there is no way that I am going to carry an iPhone nor any of its tech successors on my person.  I don't need to read my email every five minutes.  I'm not on Twitter (who knew!) and if I still have a Facebook account then I would be the last person to know.  I'm not a dinosaur and I'm certainly not an updated version of a neo-Luddite.  I simply have priorities.  When I am out, I am out.  I am in public.  I am among people, my fellow beings, or perhaps out in nature, but I will interact with my surroundings in la carne viva (living flesh) before I will try to hide myself behind a tiny phone just because I'm afraid of the people around me.  My emails I can always read when I get home.  It gives me something to look forward to.  I call this having a life.

Watching TV

I have not watched a lot of TV in my life, not since I was a kid.  I really only bother if I happen to be on vacation in a foreign country.  There will be a TV in my hotel room and since I travel in Spanish speaking countries I find the hotel television an invaluable source of Spanish language practice and cultural immersion.  I began doing this in Mexico City where I became, to my shame and embarrassment, hooked on one of the local telenovelas, or Mexican soap operas, "La Mujer de Judas" (Judas' Woman) Here's the link if you want to check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x02WeHQxiUk&list=PL8329F37C6B2922B3&index=72  When I returned home to Canada I would assiduously troll all through the Internet and Youtube to pick up episodes that I'd missed.  I lived for a while vicariously through this ridiculous soap.  It also did wonders for my Spanish.

I still don't have TV at home and I don't think that is ever going to change.  I am no longer as judgmental about TV or its viewers and I have come to appreciate that there are decent programs if you're a little bit discerning and selective.  I have particularly become fond of three recent home-brewed concoctions, "Little Mosque On the Prairie"; Schitt's Creek; and the Murdoch Mysteries (even if my uppity ex-friend thinks the third selection to be "badly-written"), all worth having a look at.  I get to see them on my laptop thanks to CBC online.  I have also seen almost every single vintage Perry Mason episode I have been able to find on Youtube.  For a while I was watching these programs every night, or until I ran out of episodes.  Now I stick to documentaries and the odd movie, almost all in Spanish.

I have always been woefully out of touch with what's on TV and likely always will be.  I used to be proud of this.  I would proudly reply to those dumb enough to ask me what I watched on TV that "I don't watch television.  I read books." 

When I was fifteen I decided to unplug.  I was seated as usual after school in our basement rec-room watching with my older brother reruns of Bewitched, the Flintstones, and Gilligan's Island.  I had been a Christian, which is to say a teenage Jesus Freak already for nine months or so.  I said to my brother, you can sit here and rot your mind if you want, I have better things to do.  So I left the room and set out to devote my life to doing better things.  My brother seemed indifferent but it was also the final death nail to our relationship.  We had never been close as siblings and he had for several years been bullying and abusive.  It only occurred to me many years later that it was quite likely that this was all he had left of me as his brother and now suddenly I had taken that away from him.  He never articulated his sense of rejection, if this is indeed what he experienced.  He might well have been glad to be finally completely rid of me.

My life has been made all the richer for staying away from TV.  I could think, feel, live and imagine without comparing my life to a TV star or a sit-com plot.  I steered clear of the manipulations of pop-culture and American mass media, cultivating a distinct and uncontaminated identity.  My speech remained relatively uninfluenced and untainted by whatever nonsense lines were being read on the idiot box by actors who didn't care a damn about me or any of their brainless fans. 

This also added to my experience of social isolation, especially in the workplace.  TV was the great social homogenizer and I wouldn't be homogenized, rather like the congealed lump of nutmeg powder that never gets dissolved into the cheese sauce.  Then you suddenly bite into it while shoveling the cauliflower into your mouth and Oh Boy!  But this is what everyone seemed to talk about during coffee break or later in the pub or the coffee shop.  Whatever the current plotline and character antics were on...pick any program.  I didn't have a clue what they were talking about, but for the little I read about in my daily Globe and Mail.

I particularly recall how in the nineties Ellen DeGeneres publicly came out as a lesbian on her TV show.  I read about it in the Globe because, of course, it was news.  But I had never seen an episode of her program.  Then one morning while walking to work I noticed a small group of young people hanging out for a cigarette break outside of the store where they worked and one was saying quite loudly "And I was just on the edge of my seat, waiting for her to say it, and I kept saying, okay, Ellen, come out of the closet.  It's time.  Ellen, come out of the closet."  I turned my head and called to them all "Ellen who?" and kept walking.

Body Space

In Canada we are very fussy about our personal space.  If a stranger or someone not well known or trusted enters within two feet or so, it is going to feel invasive.  Six inches and it's a violation.  This doesn't always square with the every day reality of coping in public.  Those of us who are not so spoiled as to take for granted the privilege of driving a car usually get around by public transit, which is often crowded to the point of being at times very uncomfortable.  Imagine having to squeeze into a seat with a stranger, your bodies actually touching and sometimes having to endure this unwanted and enforced intimacy for half an hour or longer.  Ewww!  Doesn't that just creep you out, Gentle Reader?  And please get that smile off your smug little face you obnoxious car owner, you!

Some people actually hate this kind of closeness.  Some will insist on standing rather than share a seat with a stranger.  Some are simply particular about their seat mates: no one old, fat, smelly, mentally ill, or wearing funny clothes.  There are those who will not blush about reinforcing the boundary: they sit on the edge of the seat, making it difficult for others to cross over their rigidly positioned legs to reach the window side.  There are those, often the same people, who rest their purse, bags, backpacks or whatever on the vacant seat to further discourage interlopers.  Even I have done this before, but only under rather restricted circumstances: there is someone particularly obnoxious, badly behaved or potentially aggressive coming on the bus, for example.  Generally though, as soon as the bus begins to fill up, I take my knapsack and shopping bags off the empty seat and, no matter how uncomfortable, pile everything on my lap so some grateful stranger won't have to stand on the bus.

On the other hand there are those who will openly oppose having to share a bus seat: the old woman who wouldn't make room for the Asian man dragging a huge plastic bag full of empty cans and bottles.  He got very angry and began to spout and fume about how selfish English people are.  I tried, not very successfully to calm him, others got a bit abusive and (I suspect) covertly racist.  There was also the young man who was so upset about me sitting next to him that I changed my seat just to shut him up.  When someone else sat beside him he started yelling again and this time chose to stand.   Then there was the spoiled rich kid university student who tried to transform a double seat into his private office.  I motioned to him to please remove his pack and paperwork from the seat so I could sit there.  He could still type on his laptop, for all I cared.  He got shrill and hostile, ordered me to sit in one of the vacant front seats (for seniors and disabled and I, being neither, didn't feel entitled to take up one of those seats).  I said I was sitting down anyway.  He squealed like a little girl for the bus driver to intervene and please remove this horrible bum from his prissy privileged presence (sorry about the alliteration, GR!).  The driver likely ignored him and I'm sure didn't want him to see that he was laughing.  The spoiled little rich boy finally got up in a huff, grabbed his things and took up two or three seniors' seats himself.  Other passengers congratulated me for standing my ground with the snot nosed little brat.

Today I found myself sharing a seat with an obese young woman.  It wasn't bad at first.  Contrary to my fears she did not squeeze me against the window. Then she got out her phone and began to text, her arm and elbow resting on and obstructing my arm.  I felt distinctly uncomfortable but didn't want to say anything, fearing that she would only assume that I was discriminating against her for being fat.  I was still decidedly uncomfortable, so I adjusted myself on the street and tried to gently flip her arm off of me.  She resisted, so I did it again.  This time she muttered, "Oh God!" and removed herself promptly.  When I was getting off the bus, oh if those eyes could kill!

I still think I handled the situation in the best possible way, knowing that saying anything to her likely would have resulted in conflict and perhaps getting sworn at.  There is wisdom in the saying: "Never wrestle with a pig: you'll both get dirty and, besides, the pig enjoys it."

Why Must We End This Way?

Something I still don't get about friendship: ending.  I hate ending things, with anybody.  Even when it isn't messy it usually is.  There are, I suppose, many different ways of ending a friendship.  The cowardly, passive-aggressive method seems to be the most popular.  You simply stop being in contact.  You invent excuses for not getting together, you make phone contacts and face to face visits shorter and more infrequent.  And then you're gone.

This is actually a lot worse than fighting.   By not confronting things together we are declaring that we are unwilling to be challenged, that we have no interest in changing, no interest in growing.  It is, as I said, cowardly and passive-aggressive.  It is a way of telling the other person that she is not worth the effort, that he doesn't matter enough to want to work towards reconciling and rescuing the relationship.  It is a subtle and very nasty way of shitting on someone.

I don't buy this horseshit that all friendships have a shelf life.  This is simply a lame excuse for treating others as user-friendly.  It is a consumerist, and I would say selfish and narcissistic approach towards friendship.

This isn't to say that we have to be friends until death-do-us-part.  It isn't like being married to each other, and really, how many marriages ever last?  I like the idea of flexible longterm friendships.  The kind that go on and on: you might see each other every day for a while, perhaps live together; then you fall out of orbit: you leave the country, get involved in a new career and new social circle, you marry above or below your station in life, or simply one of you, or both of you, get too busy to stay in contact.  Then one day you run into each other on the street.  The connection remains.  You go for coffee, you see each other once or twice a month; then one of you gets sick and dies.  Or something.

Not everyone can be friends.  Some people just are not designed to occupy the same room.  There are others we might see regularly in the store, the coffee shop, in the bar, in church or wherever.  We might not even know each other's name.  But we like each other, or at least there is that incandescent connection of two good wills touching each other.

I like the idea of being a friend.  I have friends, some very dear and close people.  Some I see often, perhaps every week or so, others less often, perhaps every month, or maybe once a year.  We never stop being friends, I think because we share in common that attitude of being friends, not necessarily to all and sundry, but perhaps to anyone who shares with us the same good will.  I think that if more of us would cultivate this mentality, treating others as being somehow part of our lives, perhaps we could help reduce the sense of social isolation that plagues so many, especially in cold unfriendly cities like my own lovely Vancouver.  Even today on the bus I had a conversation in Spanish with a Venezuelan and his little daughter and his father.  We may never see each other again, and yes, we are now friends for all that.  It isn't that hard to be friendly.  Once we get used to it.  And once we drop our expectations and fears.

Living With Noise

I really don't understand why people want to live downtown.  If I had a choice I wouldn't.  Of course, not everyone is equally affected by noise.  I grew up near an airport and the sound of overhead jets has never bothered me since I grew up hearing them.  I cannot stand invasive noise, especially from other people's music and especially the sound of strong base. 

It is difficult co-existing with others, especially if your next door neighbours are largely people with addictions and mental health issues as many are in the building next door.  I suspect that a lot of them might also be survivors of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.  Repeatedly I am serenaded by stereos and radios played loudly through open windows.  In warm weather I often have to keep my window closed.  Fortunately the staff in the neighbouring building are supportive and proactive and always do what they can to quieten things down when I phone to complain.

Not so easy to trace is the low ambient base that often comes vibrating into my suite around dinner time and mysteriously goes away no later than eight.  This has been going on for the past two years or so, or ever since the Japanese restaurant opened downstairs and of course they are under suspicion and I have informed the city about them, just in case.

For me the huge challenge is learning to coexist with unwelcome noise given that I live in an apartment and that this apartment is located downtown a little bit too near to the city's so-called entertainment district which is really a sorry excuse for drunken, noisy and violent behaviour by young people with few social skills and zero intelligence, emotional and otherwise.  On top of the mess is that I am particularly impacted by unwelcome noise: a symptom and after-effect of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Earplugs sometimes work but at times the base supersedes the earplugs and I still have to cope with a shadow of the unwanted noise.  It is going to be an effort and a journey to learn how to coexist with this racket.  It is not going to go away and I am unable to move.  I am on a low income and affordable housing is very scarce in this most expensive of cities.  I suppose that I could move elsewhere but I am sixty years old and not exactly a high priority for potential employers.

This too will pass.  In the meantime this could be a welcome challenge to learn more patience and compassion.

Dad

Today is the seventh anniversary of my father's death from Alzheimer's at the age of eighty-one.  I was not with him when he died.  I did not attend his funeral.  I did not find out about his death until three years later when a maternal aunt who finally had my phone number had the courage to call me.  She didn't break the news at first and then I simply mentioned my father, that I hadn't seen him in over ten years.  Did she know anything?  Then the news came out.  My aunt, herself quite aged (she will be ninety-one this year if she is still with us), became very uncomfortable and likely wanted to make her exit before I had a chance to ask her why no one had told me before.  We have not spoken since.

What is left of my family, we have mutually disowned each other and for good reason.  I know where my father died (a small town not far from here).  I do not know where he is buried or if his ashes were simply scattered by the four winds.

He was in his early seventies the last time I saw him, living in a seniors' building in another small town not far from where he died.  We were trying to be friends, to do something to mend, to heal the relationship that long ago was shredded and destroyed.  I remember well our last real conversation.  He told me that the reason he did not help me financially with getting dental treatment when I was homeless and suffering from murderous toothaches.  I had been living with him part time, three years previously, commuting back and forth from Vancouver where I still had a little work despite being homeless.  He told me his real reason for doing nothing to help me.  He was providing my brother, his precious favourite son, with money to finance his cocaine habit.  I said nothing.  We were seated at a bench by the ocean watching the sunlight on the water.  The silence that enfolded us also told me that this would be the last time we would ever see each other again.

In early December I phoned him to ask about seeing him at Christmas.  He seemed confused and said that he wouldn't be seeing me, but my brother and his granddaughter instead.  It was clear that I would be neither welcome nor invited.  He had done many things in the past to hurt me.  I nearly drowned myself while staying with him, so impacted was I by the emotional and verbal abuse as well as the memory of other abuses and insults that my body still carried.  I shut down and decided not to call him for a while.  Eight months later in July I began seeing a psychiatrist who used talk therapy for four years to treat me for complex post-traumatic stress disorder.  My father, with the rest of my family, had abused me in many ways: emotionally, verbally, physically and sexually, throughout my childhood.  It had left its mark, its lasting impact.  It was time to put paid to this.

I also realized that if I was to recover that it would be better to see no one in my family during those four years.  I did try to call my father a couple of times but found myself regressing to emotions and behaviour that were common to me when I was unwell: intense fear, an instinctive submission, a scary passivity that not only accepted abusive treatment but invited further.  My psychiatrist and I were both in agreement that I had better not contact either my father or my brother (my mother had already been dead for many years).

I did well in therapy and after four years I tried to contact my father, from whom I had heard nothing.  I had no success.  I researched online and went through directory assistance.  Nothing.  I had a business card for my brother from several years ago, but I still did not feel safe about seeing my former abuser so I left it alone and only hoped that someone in the family would call me and tell me what was happening.  Several relatives did have my contact information.  Nothing again.

I realize now that when I legally changed my full name in 1995 as a way of distancing myself not from them so much but from the abuse that my family would likely not take well to it, that since they didn't like me anyway that they would all likely disown me.  This turned out to be only too true.  When I stayed with him part time (in the late nineties) my father, when drunk, would also mention something very similar.  We are no longer father and son, he would say, but we can still be friends.  Not surprisingly, he refused to call me by my new name and I took care to not insist though maybe I should have.

I must say that when I finally learned of his death that the emotions were strong and very mixed.  For a few years, when he was sober, we were actually friends and seemed to enjoy each other's company.  His mother died in her nineties and he returned to the bottle and our relationship suffered grievously.

Today I remembered when I was seventeen and staying with my father and his girlfriend and her son (the cuckoo in the nest) for a few very miserable months.  I showed him some portraits from my sketchbook, all very well rendered.  None of my subjects were smiling.  He had been drinking, as always, the only way he knew how to unwind after work.  He simply snarled that I had no business drawing such miserable looking people when there is so much sadness in the world already and walked away.  I never showed him my art again.  And I became noticeably absent from the house.

I cannot say that I miss him.  I am sad at times for the father I never had but I am happy now and free from regrets.  I am rather glad that he's gone now though I no longer bear him ill will.  I am free from him and from all my family.  No regrets at all.  Rest in peace, Dad, because even in my own imperfect way I loved you and I love you still.

Robert Greenlaw, 1928-2009

Geezer Toons

I never thought I would say it but I love being sixty.  I even said as much to someone today, the owner of a coffee shop where I like to pause to work in my sketchbook.  He seemed a bit nonplussed but I especially enjoy being this age.  I had coffee the other day with a young friend who is twenty-something and just to hear about the things she still struggles and has to deal with, things that really no longer are issues for me, really helps put things in perspective. 

I cannot say precisely what it is I like about being this age.  Perhaps I feel more serene, more confident, less concerned about what others might think.  Perhaps I have so much life experience under my belt now that I no longer feel easily flapped.  I have noticed that I have never felt this emotionally stable but simultaneously free.  It isn't perfect of course.  Nothing is.  I'm still irritable and impatient.  I'm not at all impulsive these days, really the very opposite.  I have become very methodical, meticulous, self-disciplined and routine oriented.  Almost to the point of wondering at times if I might be a bit obsessive compulsive.  Every morning it is the same deal: shower, clean my apartment, make coffee, eat breakfast, go to work.  I make sure I walk no less than five miles a day, up to ten if I can pull it off.  I get home, make dinner, do the day's paperwork, eat dinner while listening to the World at Six on CBC Radio One, write something spectacularly predictable on this here blog, watch a video in Spanish after hearing a lot of As It Happens, then listening to the profound wisdom du jour on Ideas, then off to bed by ten where I read myself to sleep, usually a novel in Spanish.  The next day it is the same old, up between 5:30 and 6, and so the day after, and the day after...

When I was younger this kind of repetitive routine would have been hell to me.  Now it is heaven.  It is very grounding.  It helps me keep my ducks in a row.




Self-discipline, you know.  Don't even think of aging without it. 

I have also become particularly bloody minded and I quite enjoy this.  Today I noticed a young twenty-something woman standing timidly on the curb while traffic went by.  Knowing that she could well be standing there till she reached menopause I simply ventured out into the traffic, signalling at the oncoming car that they had better stop or there would be consequences.  The young lady felt a bit emboldened and just as she left the curb I mentioned to her that sometimes you have to make them stop.  Then, later this afternoon, sick and tired of the noise coming from the restaurant playing music downstairs, I simply went down and asked them nicely, or rather told them nicely to turn it down, which they did, for a while anyway till likely a customer insisted that they crank it up again.  I am nagging city hall about them and I expect that something will be done about it.

Generally, I just don't feel pressured any more about anything, even though I am under more professional pressure than ever.  It just seems to roll off of me.  I really don't know how this has happened though I am sure there is something spiritually and godly at work here.  In the meantime I wander down beautifully treed and gardened streets and parks like a drunken grinning idiot, revelling in the glory of nature and this magical season of life called spring when I'm not talking on my phone in Spanish to my voicemail, my imaginary friend named Fulano (Spanish for What's Its Face), and giving thanks for every moment, unless I happen to be avoiding inhaling second hand cigarette smoke from some bonehead self-destructive addict.  I am constantly doing art, drawing in my sketchbook in coffee shops and painting on canvasses at home.  It isn't all bliss, I have had my health concerns, but the grumpy moments seem to be pretty short-lived these days. 

Every moment is a blessing even if I happen to be miserable at the time and I don't want to ever forget this.  Life is too short.

I am determined to make this last.

Happy Earth Day

It's that day again.   On the news this morning I just heard Prime Minister Junior make what is likely to become one of his many lame-ass pronouncements during his administration.  Pierre's little boy said in very clear terms that we are not going to be going off fossil fuels any time soon because that would wreck the economy and kill jobs.  Am I the only one seeing Stephen Harper gradually emerge like a weltering incubus from out of his young pretty visage?

I was having a conversation yesterday with a woman sharing tables on a Starbuck's patio with one of my clients and me.  The wind was strong and I commented that a new weather system was blowing in.  She expressed concern about climate change and global warming.  Yes, the weather has been till recently spectacularly lovely and summery but we are still in April and the prospects and ramifications of climate change are quite frightening.  To indicate the absolute slowness or absolute indifference of average people I gestured to the dense motor traffic on Cambie Street.  She concurred that most people are too lazy, selfish and indifferent to want to give up their comforts and conveniences even if the alternative is going to be a vastly reduced shelf life for our species and life on this planet.  Junior's insistence that jobs and the economy are going to take precedence over the planet simply brings this to sad and tragic emphasis.

I am still optimistic, unlike the lady on the patio.  I think we will eventually get it right.  I also believe that our asses are going to get kicked good and hard.  We may have to prepare to wake up to a decidedly different planet and a vastly altered humanity.  We might have to reckon with a hugely reduced global population and huge wars and conflicts and migrations of millions because of the impact of climate change.  We might have to accept that vast tracts of formerly arable and liveable land could be rendered uninhabitable or under water.  We might have to accept the mass loss of cultural heritage and memory following the coming dark age.  And the loss of technology.

We just might find ourselves fighting World War 4 with sticks, clubs and stones.  Or, more of us could give up our cars (I have never owned one), give up meat (I have been a vegetarian for more than twenty years) and do everything in our power to encourage others that they go and do likewise.

Loss of jobs and economy as a threat has always been the preferred red herring of the right.  Please, let's have the good sense to have done with this nonsense and let's get on with saving the planet and keeping it green and liveable for future generations.

Art Whore

I actually painted those two auspicious words in bright red letters on a brown t shirt I was wearing during the nineties when I was still defining myself as an artist.  I wasn't able to find sufficient work to pay all the bills and my paintings weren't exactly selling like hotcakes.  They were hardly selling at all.  I was already despairing of ever seeing commercial success as an artist and had taken a decidedly sour grapes perspective about it.  I concluded that in order to be a commercially viable artist I would somehow have to sell my soul or barter off my integrity.  I would have to prostitute myself, I would need to become an Art Whore.  I made a joke of it and actually nearly stepped into a couple of morally and ethically dangerous conundrums.  I did not try to sleep my way to the top and really, being already in my forties even I could no longer dispute that I might already be...er...a little bit past my prime?

I was sorely lacking in connections.  I did know a famous artist but she had already distanced herself from me and didn't appear to care a fig about my ability as an artist.   She was a conceptual artist who didn't like aesthetic beauty and for this reason truly looked down her refined nose at my talents.  I knew she wasn't going to lift a finger to help me get anywhere in the art world.  I also didn't really know if the art world would be the best place for me to end up in.

Then came my mental health crisis, followed by homelessness and the whole struggle towards recovery and reordering and re-establishing my life.  I continued to paint.  I was, and still am growing and developing as an artist.  I soon had to accept the importance of working fulltime in order to pay the bills, something I had assiduously tried to avoid, not because of laziness, but because I wanted to have time to paint and to promote my art.  I have since come to accept that this has been an impossible dream.

I still paint and I carry my sketchbook with me everywhere since I am drawing every day in public cafes.  People are sometimes attracted to my art, and will stop to praise or ask questions.  I suppose I could start carrying business cards with me.  As far as getting into a good gallery I really don't think that will happen during my lifetime and if it does I will be truly amazed.  I have already stated in my last will and testament that should my paintings survive me and appreciate in value that all the proceeds of sales of my art are to go to the Mennonite Central Committee.  No fat greedy art dealer is going to make so much as one single Colombian peso (worth .004 cents Canadian) from my work.  In the meantime I continue to draw and paint, not with the hope of becoming a commercial success, and not to be an Art Whore, but out of pure, joyful and loving obedience to the creative force of the Holy Spirit that guides, inspires and motivates me.  The rest is not in my hands and I am happy with this.

Friends Of Random Occurrences

This seems to be how I meet people.  Quite simply, I meet them.  Or we meet each other?  It isn't all that spontaneous.  I have made several new friends online through the Conversation Exchange Page where we arrange to meet together and help each other with language.  In my case I offer support in English for support in Spanish.  They don't all become friends or good friends.  In some cases, after one or two contacts we simply decide that any further face time could result in mutual homicide and we very gladly go our separate ways.  But some, a few, have become excellent friends and are people with whom I hope to be in contact for many years to come. 

Other people I tend to meet more spontaneously.  And not with the intention of befriending and hanging out with for life every single person I see on the street or public transit or in a coffee shop or a forest or wherever.  Most recently was that fellow who gave me a meteorite after we began to spontaneously chat with each other in Spanish.  I really have no idea if we will see each other again.  That same day I encountered a man from the church I used to attend.  He seemed interested in chatting but I was with a client so I simply mumbled "I'm at work right now" and he kept moving. 

I have just been having email contact with yet another friend of random occurrences.  I will do almost nothing to identify him since it is not my intention to embarrass anyone on these pages unless they are absolute douchebags and have done something to deserve it, and this fine individual is certainly not a douchebag.  I saw him in the forest.  He was sitting on my bench.  I at first thought, "What the hell is he doing on my bench?" But I figured, well, he deserves to sit there too, my name isn't on it and I would like to sit so I'll see if he's okay with sharing.  He was okay with sharing.  We sat quietly for a while, then I thanked him and left.  A week later we quietly shared the same bench again.  Another week passed and there we were, but this time we had a conversation.  I discerned a decent creative person and a few days later we had coffee together before he left for his native country.

I have met many people this way.  Some are still friends, some aren't and I continue meeting others on this basis, not out of any sense of need, neediness and certainly without a conscious agenda to make a hobby of collecting friends.  Quite simply, I am a friendly person.  I believe that we are all connected and that we are all family, and really, there are so few variations in the human genome all across the full racial spectrum that we'd might as well say that we are all related.  I am often friendly and I try to be respectful.  If the other person doesn't want to say anything I keep my mouth shut.  If I sense that they want their space, I leave them alone.  In some cases they will want to chat a bit, or maybe, say on the bus, share a joke, or if they want to inquire about my art while I'm drawing in a coffee shop they might want to stay and visit for a while. 

This is my advice to those who whine and grumble about what an unfriendly city Vancouver is:  First and foremost, GET OVER YOURSELVES!!!  Chuck out your inventory of what kind or class of people you want to be friends with because chances are you might stay very lonely for the rest of you life unless you get over your high school snobbery and make an effort to reach out beyond your personal comfort zone.  Leave your iPod at home and put your phone in your pocket and pay attention to your surroundings.  Try to see those around you as long lost relatives, but please do not stare.  If you are looking for a girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, hookup or you just want to get laid then don't do this.  Go online and look there.  But if out in public, you see someone's eyes brighten just a little, when you say hi to them, and they might want to simply ask how are you, then please respond.  See if they want to pause or visit.  Always be respectful.  Be very patient because things never go as planned or expected and be prepared to be surprised.

And don't be a creep.

Cynical

Cynicism is irony that doesn't know when or how to smile.  Cynicism is the scab on top of an open wound.  Irony is the scar that forms later.  I have often been accused of cynicism, especially when I was young.  Now that I'm older and have learned how to laugh at myself, as well as everyone else (the question here is, am I laughing at everyone else or is everyone else laughing at me?  Hey, at least we're all laughing)  In my twenties I was even almost physically attacked by one sad pathetic man whom I shall not name in this blog.  Let's just say that he was older than me, and one of those classic self-hating gay Christians of a certain vintage.  In a restaurant with others following a Sunday evening church service I thought I was being funny and others were laughing when the self-hating gay Christian of a certain vintage lashed out and screamed in my face "Why are you so CYNICAL!!!!  I was gobsmacked and simply asked him what the problem was.  Now that I'm older and more ironical than cynical I would probably have smiled and said "Hey, I'm only getting started and if you're really good I'll even see that you get a free ticket."

I suppose I've been angry all my life.  At fourteen one fellow, shocked at what he was hearing, cried out in dismay "Why are you so vicious?"  He was one of the older kids, nineteen or so, I was hanging out with in the park during that summer, smoking pot and creating entertainment for local police.  He was the first person whom I ever saw snort cocaine.  I had good reason even then to be angry, or vicious, or cynical:  my parents were negotiating a bitter divorce and I was already a survivor of prolonged child abuse.  I was also above average bright and above average bored and numbing my pain with the free tokes generously offered in the local legend park that summer.

At twenty-one an individual whom I quite admired and felt inspired by (like most twenty-one year olds I was always out searching for my mentor of the week) told me that I was very angry.  I told him in a not very kind voice why I was angry and if he didn't shut up about it I would get even angrier if he didn't shut his cake hole (Okay, I made up this last part)

I spent my twenties in denial about being a punk.  A really cool lesbian musician I used to work with commented one day recently that I must have been a punk when I was young.  I kind of nodded and found myself embracing my spikey, razor wire-bedecked inner punk.  I still haven't stopped bleeding.

Summer In April

Well, Gentle Reader, it's back.  Summer in April.  Just like last year.  The New Normal.  Likely caused by global warming and I feel guilty about enjoying it with the knowledge that this could also presage the end of the world as we know it.  I left my apartment this morning with a sweater only to return almost immediately to take it off.  I still saw people, early risers like me, clad in a couple of layers and apparently suffering for it.  It has remained comfortably warm all day, like a sunny day in June. 

I have had time to walk everywhere.  I detoured by a park on my way to the Skytrain this morning, logging an extra mile.  Then my middle client cancelled (I still get paid for the time) and I walked the four miles or so from Commercial Drive to Granville, stopping for an hour or something in a café on Main Street where I chilled with an iced Americano while working on my current drawing, a green peacock.



Isn't he a pretty birdy?  They are a bit larger and taller than the familiar blue or Indian peafowl that we are normally familiar with.  They also tend to be aggressive and can be dangerous to humans.



By the way, Gentle Reader, Peacock is the word used to name the male of the species, Peahen is the female and Peafowl is the general name of the species.  You're welcome!

I later visited a client staying in a locked ward at the university.  His nurse wanted to know why I was overdressed given the hot weather, even though I'm not today really.  I am wearing a loose fitting blue cotton shirt and black jeans, socks and while I was outside, running shoes.  I never wear shoes indoors unless I've forgotten to vacuum.  Instead of getting defensive I agreed that my shirt is a bit heavy for the warm weather.  She wanted to know why I wasn't wearing sandals.  My excuse is that socks and runners provide better support since I walk a lot.  She tried to tell me that there are excellent sandals available with built in support.  I said thank you, not wanting to get into an inappropriate argument about my personal haberdashery in front of my client, who himself was wearing two jackets in the hot weather.  The fact of the matter is I used to wear sandals and flip-flops and because I walked everywhere my feet would always be filthy by the end of the day but why bore her with details.  Besides, most people, when they learn how much I walk in an average day, usually look impressed, shocked, or a bit of both.

Later I sat in a favourite café on campus with my sketchbook and another iced Americano (it's all decaf today) then walked a couple of miles in the forest.  A gentleman with a dog (a friendly chocolate lab) stopped me to ask directions and chat briefly.  I felt a bit impatient because I didn't want to miss my bus.  I have got into the habit of arriving home from work no later than five-thirty, giving me sufficient time for paperwork, preparing dinner, cleaning up, writing this infernal blog, etc.  Sure enough, I missed not one but two buses and cursed my good nature and good social skills.  The bus that arrived was full and I had to stand, but then some courtesy seats were vacated by young passengers with a conscience and I sat comfortably for most of the ride home.  I am sixty and sometimes taken for older, sometimes younger, but often treated surprisingly well by young people on public transit, which seems a bit odd given that I must have walked twelve miles today and that my legs are probably stronger than theirs.

I am home now and somewhat gobsmacked that I have just discovered in my drawer nearly four hundred dollars worth of Colombian pesos that I must have forgotten to take with me on my vacation.

Not a bad day at all!

Broken Vessels

I am thinking here of something very personal with me that I would like to write about.  As you know, Gentle Reader, I am a PTSD survivor, or rather complex PTSD which is even worse and harder to negotiate given that it often comes as a result of prolonged child abuse.  I will tell you a little about the abuse and how it affected me.  My father, a poorly educated alcoholic was not ready to be a parent.  He emotionally and on occasion sexually abused me throughout my childhood.  He rarely hit me.  That was my mother's department.  She had a quick temper and a pronounced tendency towards violence and would go from mere spanking to hitting, slapping, beating me with objects, throwing cutlery at me, resulting in a severed vein in my foot when I was fifteen (there was a lot of blood) and once when I was eleven even ripping my shirt off my back in front of visiting friends of hers.  My older brother was also violent and for years I was going to school every day covered with bruises thanks to his beatings.

My mother and I eventually became friends once the beatings stopped when I was a teenager and of course, long ago I forgave her.  My brother and father continued to despise me.  Carrying this kind of baggage I went out into the world on my own at the young age of eighteen.  My mother was busy trying to leave the abusive alcoholic with whom she was living and my father hated me so I wasn't going to be welcome in the home that he shared with his girlfriend I was scarcely prepared to meet the challenges of having to fend for myself.  To my surprise I was able to pull it off, though I was never able to find work that paid more than just a little above minimum wage, neither was I able to finish university because of the stress and the expense.  This was all part of the twin legacy of complex PTSD and surviving my parents' divorce when I was thirteen.

Despite all odds I've done okay.  I am still poor, but I work in a profession that I find rewarding, as a mental health peer support worker and I have experienced a thorough recovery from my mental health issues.  I live in a decent apartment, government subsidized of course, otherwise I would likely be on the street.  I would also say that I have flourished as an artist, even though you will not find my paintings in any major or minor galleries and I have become something of a world traveller.  I have also become fluent in Spanish.  Considering all I've had to cope with and sort out throughout my life this has not been a bad outcome and things indeed could have turned out a lot worse.

I will even go so far as to say that my life has turned out better as a result of having had complex PTSD.

Let me explain:  This in no way justifies the abuse that I suffered nor does it let the abusers of the hook.  It was a horrible and horrendous experience and the consequences have been extensive.  But complex PTSD, for all its debilitating influence, also opened me up.  I was like a broken vessel, like the alabaster container of fragrant ointment that the sinful woman, traditionally Mary Magdalene, broke open to anoint the feet of Jesus.  I was broken open.  The consequences were less than pleasant: I was hyper-sensitive, vulnerable to more abuse, and lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem.  I was easily victimized and went from one toxic relationship to another.  But my brokenness taught me empathy.  My vulnerability made me open spiritually and I became deeply interested in the welfare of others.  My creative gifts also came to find expression and I found myself drawing out my creativity as an essential tool for my healing.

I think that in our ambitious and avaricious hyper-commercial culture we are taught to be tough, ruthless, competitive and brutal.  The broken, the weak are cast aside, but we, the broken and the weak, also possess the real gifts of beauty, art and healing without which the rest of us cannot survive.  Never underestimate the hidden value of pain and suffering.  They are not goods in themselves but they can also be instrumental in reforming and rebuilding our lives as authentic human beings as broken vessels bearing exquisite treasures and costly fragrance.   Only the really vulnerable are also truly strong.

The Beauty Of Age

I just saw a current photo of comedian Carol Burnett.  She is eighty-three this month and looks maybe fifty-five.  And she will be performing in my city in a couple of short weeks.  Eighty-three and still kicking the can.  Isn't that something?  Isn't that awesome?  And wow, the years, and her plastic surgeon have been very kind to her. 

All these aging starlets, torch-singers, movie stars and comedians, all of them women, all still doing big-time gigs in their eighties and all looking not only great, but fabulous.  Sexy, gorgeous grannies and great grandmas, singing, acting, dancing and making us laugh, thanks to tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.

I think this business of being the ageless goddess has its beginnings in Marlene Dietrich, the great German-American movie star with the most intoxicating androgynous beauty and who couldn't sing worth a shit but still sang anyway and laughed all the way to the bank.  When she was what, forty-seven? there was a spread about her in Life magazine as the world's most glamorous grandmother.  At fifty she was doing the cabaret circuit in Paris, an eternally youthful Circe glowing with (likely surgically enhanced) youth.  She stuck with her personal myth of eternal beauty and glamour, lying through her teeth as her face and other body parts held bravely up against the forces of gravity till she finally threw in the towel well into her seventies.  At eighty or so, appalled that the world might see her as a wrinkled sagging granny, Marlene went into seclusion, where she died at the age of ninety-one.  Here is a portrait I did of her almost twenty-years ago:



I have included the text of one of her many remarkable quotes, this from her final interview in seclusion as a woman well into her eighties speaking with the actor Maximilian Schell: "We cannot live without illusions even if we must fight for them"  I cannot think of anything I could add to this. While researching for this portrait I particularly focussed on an archive photo taken candidly of Ms. Dietrich in the early sixties at the funeral of Edith Piaf with whom she was lovers for a while.  She looked in this photo every one of her sixty years, a grieving, sad and desolate old woman.  I also borrowed features from other photos of Marlene taken throughout her life in order to bring out as complete an expression in my interpretation of her as possible.

Gentle Reader, aging is beautiful and old age is a gift.  Every wrinkle, every sagging feature is like a detail in a map and we do ourselves and others an absolute disservice when we try to disguise or extinguish the marks of time.  Cosmetic surgery does nothing to beautify and everything to turn someone into a sad, pathetic old doll.  I would love to see Carol Burnett, Sophia Loren and Jane Fonda in the authentic glory of their authentic old age: grey and white hair, wrinkles, sag, drooping breasts cellulite and varicose veins and everything else that tells that you have lived, that you have lived well and authentically and the stamp of time is nothing to be ashamed of because this in itself is the true mark of beauty.

Veiled Threat

I an dedicating this post to Muslim women in Vancouver who wear veils in public.  I have to admit it's taken me a few years to get used to this.  I was downright shocked the first time I saw three veiled women walking proudly together in the Richmond mall.  This might have been around ten years ago, perhaps eleven.  I wanted to approach them and say to them, "We are in Canada now.  You don't have to cover your faces to go out in public."  Then a couple of weeks later I saw three more veiled women in Yaletown near where I live.  I felt positively creeped out.  They all reminded me of Darth Vader.  I again had to resist the temptation of telling them that here in Canada women are allowed to go about bare-face.  Then in Stanley Park in a play area a Middle Eastern man was pushing his veiled wife on a swing, like she was his little girl, as their small child looked on.  Then, something happened that to this day I am not proud of.  A young man and a veiled woman were walking just ahead of me early on a summer evening.  I think they were brother and sister.  I blurted out "This is Canada.  Women are free in this country.  You don't have to wear a veil here."  They both ran away from me, fast.

Then the niqab began to hit the news.  Everyone, especially in Quebec, appeared to be outraged that in this age of feminism and equality that some women would still publicly veil themselves as though they were living in the Twelfth Century.  The Harper Conservative government made things even worse as they poured gas on the fire.  Then I did something that to this day I thank myself for.  I began to open my mind.  I read articles in the papers and online and listened to programs on the CBC.  It became evident that Muslim women here in Canada wore veils in public for one very simple and very legitimate reason.  They had chosen to.  Not their husbands, nor their fathers, nor their male siblings.  No one was doing their thinking for them.  It was their way of honouring their God and their way of preserving their sense of honour and modesty. 

I gradually came to respect them.  Realizing how many innocent Muslims were being scapegoated and discriminated against because of terrorism I began to feel compassion for them.  Then, one summer evening, it really came into perspective for me.  On a warm July evening I was walking down Granville Street.  Everyone appeared half undressed, especially the young women, but there were also plenty of shirtless young men flaunting their steroids.  In the midst of all this exposed sin (oops, Freudian slip, here Gentle Reader.  I meant to write skin) and flesh I noticed a Muslim man, likely from the Middle East, in traditional garb.  Surrounding him were his four teenage sons.  I really wondered what they must be thinking right now.  Were they lured by the gorgeous half dressed young women (and perhaps even by the half dressed young men?)  Were they shocked, horrified? Scandalized?

Then it occurred to me just how sexualized is our culture here in North America and especially on the West Coast.  I began to think of rape culture and how young women still cannot feel safe going out alone in some neighbourhoods because of young male swine.  I also recalled how very recently I had confronted a four wheel drive in Yaletown full of randy obnoxious South Asian men harassing a young woman walking by, and of how I told them all off and commanded them to leave her and other young women alone.  They actually paid heed, after trying to argue lamely, and drove away.

Even if going around fully veiled is an extreme, and perhaps inappropriate statement to make, these veiled women are still making a valid statement.  We still have a long way to go in our culture before the genders really are fully equal and before women can feel fully safe and respected.  In the meantime, next time you see a veiled woman, think of thanking her for reminding us of the current sad reality that women and men still have to live in here and bless her for her faithfulness to Allah and her personal integrity.

Kicking And Screaming

That is how I plan to go out, should the bill that is being tabled in Ottawa permitting assisted suicide takes its worst-case scenario and results in legislated geronticide.  This is the elephant in the room and no one dares mention its name.  Yes it is admirable that they have excluded children and the mentally ill as qualifying for assisted dying and for good reason.  Neither are in any position to make an informed responsible choice.   I work with mentally ill adults and I would far rather that my clients who suffer from depression rekindle a sense of hope for themselves and their lives and that they never succeed in taking their lives.  The others, it is understandable that they would want this legislation.  I have worked in palliative care and I have given personal care to people incapacitated by strokes, dementia, Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntingdon's, Alzheimer's, cancer, amputations and many other causes of severe disability.  I have seen first hand and up close the incredible suffering, chronic pain, helplessness and abject humiliation that these people have had to endure and live with, many without the relief of death for many years to come.  Not all seemed interested in killing themselves, others, yes, I would say so.  I also, while caring for some of these individuals, only wished that I could administer a lethal overdose of medication to put them out of their misery.  Or was it really to put me out of my misery?

One thing I have come to notice in my years of caregiving experience: those closest to the suffering of loved ones, including their professional caregivers, often suffer emotionally more than the patients themselves.  It is something dreadful and irredeemably horrible to have to witness the extreme suffering and demise of others, especially if it is your mother, your father, your spouse, your child.  This is not to underestimate or trivialize the patient's suffering which is often unimaginably intense.  But because it is their suffering they also often find their own resources and strategies for coping.

In order to appreciate the broad public support for assisted suicide it might be helpful to consider the spirit of the times we are living in.  We have had the good fortune of enjoying the most advanced and sophisticated medical care in the history of our species and in Canada at least this care is universally accessible thanks to our single payer public health care system.  Suffering used to be more accepted as a necessary evil, something to get through like a severe winter, to live and cope with a bare minimum of whining and grumbling, and perhaps to learn some important life lessons from it.  Now, we cringe from suffering, I suspect because we have become somewhat weak and spineless from the good times we live in.  We are more easily frightened than ever, it seems, and will jump at any panacea or easy escape from suffering.  Compared to our grandparents we are a generation of spineless cowards.

This is not to dismiss or undervalue the intense suffering that people who are terminally ill and their loved ones have to endure.  I am only trying to contextualize things a bit.

There is also the equally valid and legitimate concern that we are woefully deficient in available and decent palliative care services.  But palliative care can be expensive and if it's on the taxpayers' dime the less generous among us are not going to be very happy about having to shove out.  It would be far easier just to kill the dying prematurely, or in this case, to provide the easy way out of assisted suicide to save them from the suffering and humiliation and to keep the coins in the public purse.

For this reason I think it is not unreasonable to consider that assisted suicide is going to be a tremendous cost-saver and in these cynical times of unrestrained global capitalism, when making crap-loads of money has become the consummate value of human existence won't it become all the easier to devalue human life according to its cost-effectiveness?

I am thinking of when in Ontario in 1995 and later here in British Columbia in 2001 when right wing governments were elected partly on the platform of promising to effectively punish the poor for placing a drain on the public purse.  Thousands were tossed off of social assistance and onto the street as they were suddenly completely unable to fend for themselves.  Many have died from homelessness.  If our governments with public support are going to get away with this kind of cruel and unconscionable treatment of some of the most vulnerable members of society then why shouldn't they be equally callous towards seniors and people with disabilities on low incomes?  Historically the poor have always been considered expendable and worthless and have always been cruelly scapegoated.  Why not just quietly kill us off under the guise of assisted suicide which of course would be entirely up to us.  But as options and the possibilities of living with dignity shrink increasingly through shrinking revenue and public indifference it is no far stretch to imagine that this could make life so intolerable for some of us that we would want to kill ourselves or for someone to help us do it.  Especially when we consider the timing of this right to assisted dying bill which is going to dovetail nicely with the swelling population of seniors and the strain we are already beginning to put on the taxpayer.

What I am saying here is that no human being has the right to take another human life, not even if it happens to be your own life, regardless the circumstances.  I admit that this thinking is informed by my Christian faith and my deep belief that life is a gift and must be treated and appreciated as a gift even if we are not able to live our lives on our own terms.  That part of living with dignity is accepting that we and the cosmos are ruled by a higher power to whom we will all one day have to give account.  But since we live in a secular society and very few people seem to value the spiritual and moral teachings of the great religions that once steered and informed our lawmaking, not always in the best ways but sometimes in the very best ways, we still have to consent to the democratic process.  The majority of Canadians want this pernicious legislation?  Then so be it.  But I also say that we have to tailor and develop and restrain this legislation in such a way that it will produce the least possible harm.  And this also means that it must never ever become an open door to geronticide, nor a genocide of the poor and disabled.  Not now and not ever.  Our value of human life has to supersede the popular fetishizing of personal control and freedom of choice.  Or they must somehow be brought into balance.  And if they are brought into balance I think we should expect a very long and twisted journey for all of us.

Cafe Cosme

Cosme is my unofficial name.  I gave myself the name following seeing it in a novel I read about medieval Spain (in Spanish, of course).  After I picked the name for myself I looked up it's meaning on the internet and here is what I found:

People with this name have a deep inner desire to inspire others in a higher cause, and to share their own strongly held views on spiritual matters.           
People with this name tend to initiate events, to be leaders rather than followers, with powerful personalities. They tend to be focused on specific goals, experience a wealth of creative new ideas, and have the ability to implement these ideas with efficiency and determination. They tend to be courageous and sometimes aggressive. As unique, creative individuals, they tend to resent authority, and are sometimes stubborn, proud, and impatient.

That is me to a T.  This afternoon I am hanging out in Café Cosme.  I finished work at the ridiculously early hour of 2 in the afternoon and thought of spending an hour or two inside a café with my sketchbook.  Then I recalled that I had already spent time in two different cafes today and this is getting expensive.  Following a stroll in the outlandishly wealthy neighbourhood of Shaughnessy I took the bus home, made a pot of cocoa and relaxed with it in my recliner chair with my sketchbook on my lap while listening to classical music (the Mozart Requiem and Charpentier's Te Deum, if you must know).  There is a multisensual beauty to this that would not happen inside a coffee shop.  I use fair trade cocoa and play the Mozart Requiem while making it from scratch, using butter, brown sugar, cocoa powder, milk and vanilla extract.  Later the Charpentier Te Deum comes on, a masterpiece of the French Baroque.  Then I pour the cocoa into a beautiful cocoa pot I purchased in Mexico and pour it into my gorgeous Laurel Burch mug which I was given twenty-four years ago as a gift from the women I was in Christian Community with.



As I said, with the beautiful music, the lovely pottery, the flavour and fragrance of freshly made cocoa (fair trade and benefitting those who produce the product) and the developing drawing on my knee (a golden pheasant.  Check the image)



I've somewhat exaggerated the size of the ruff as though he is expanding it for display.

As I said, it is a multisensual experience. 

The only handicap to doing the art at home is the lack of contact with the public.  Even when no one seems to comment or notice my art I know it is being noticed, perhaps criticized, perhaps admired, and while I do not do this for attention or for compliments I do my drawing in cafes as a kind of offering to the public, a way of sharing my life with others.

But sometimes I have to give priority to my budget and the rapidly shrinking money in my wallet.  And to enjoy the peace and quiet of home.

Friendship Isn't Easy

I'm sure we all remember our first childhood friends, of how uncomplicated friendship was.  We simply played together.  We didn't compete with each other and there was never the lurking danger of being abandoned.  There were no hidden agendas.  I don't think that any of us were even possessive.  None of these friendships were built to last, of course, and some of us moved, some found new friends, some found loneliness.

Now that I am of a rather advanced age I see friendship not as an entitlement, and not as an already given.  It is a gift.  It is a privilege.  I don't know how long my current friendships are going to last, since everyone I'm in contact with I have known for under a decade.  I rather like it this way.  It is like having a fresh start, being given a clean slate.  There is only one individual in my life who knew me before I legally changed my name more than twenty years ago and our friendship only resumed in the last four years following decades of dormancy.  The others have only known me as Aaron.  Not as Greg, my birth name.

I have lost some friends recently.  Most of them are Anglicans and since I have left their precious den of lying hypocrites some of them would rather not give me the time of day.  That is okay with me, I suppose.  It is sad, and I think rather tragic that alleged Christians are so averse to reconciliation.  As though the act of apologizing is simply too degrading to them.  But these are Anglicans and Anglicans tend to be very lacking in integrity and honesty.

I am not happy about losing them but if this is what they want then of course it must be respected.  I am not letting them off easily.  I sent an email to one of them just the other day, explaining that I would like our friendship to continue but that I still expect from him an apology for some very harsh things he told me in an email a few months ago around my decision to leave his precious church.  He has done nothing to respond ever since that nasty screed he sent me.  So I have given him seven days to come up with an apology.  If he does not then the friendship is over, at least till he comes around which may never happen.

I am not writing anyone off any more.  I am done with burning bridges.  I will only consider a friendship over when the other person is harmful or dangerous to me or when the other party has made it clear that they no longer want to see me.

I still want to err on the side of reconciliation.  Life is short, don't you think, Gentle Reader?

One Small Voice

In an email to a friend yesterday I mentioned that I have been writing this blog every single day for more than two years, or since December 2013.  This for me has done wonders to clarify my thinking and also to challenge me to live with greater integrity.  I sometimes wonder how many people really read my little screed and what kind of impact or influence that I am having, if any. 

Really when I think of myself these days I often wonder, who do you think you are, anyway?  Why would anyone want to listen to me and what could I possibly have to say to others that hasn't been said better and more eloquently elsewhere that could make even one shred of difference?  My qualifications for smallness are enormous.  I do not have a university degree, I live in relative poverty, I am underemployed in a line of work that by its very name stigmatizes me: mental health peer support worker.  I live in government subsidized social housing where a number of the tenants have mental health issues and all of us are poorer than church mice.  I have my own lived history of mental health issues from which I have thankfully recovered.  I am an undiscovered artist, an unknown, but for this blog, writer, and I suppose in my way an unsung hero, though really, Gentle Reader, isn't it rather tacky of me to toot my own horn?  I come from humble working class roots and I live in Canada, one of the more obscure, if envied and admired nations of the world.

I still write this blog because I need to be heard.  I want to be heard and I ought to be heard.  For the attention?  No way.  Because I feel called to do this?  Well, duh, yes.  Because I have something to say?  We all have something to say and each one of us has a unique voice, not simply for its content but because being our voice it is something that no one else can say in our place.  This is why I write this.  Every single day.

I like to think of the butterfly effect.  You know, that the butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in Brazil will eventually generate the conditions for a typhoon or hurricane elsewhere in the world.  I do not know what any one of my readers is going to do with what I write.  But if it happens to be something good, timely, inspired, helpful and could well be just that tiny little implement to help change the world for the better then, Yes, Gentle Reader, I am going to take the chance, I am going to risk ridicule and publish for the world to read my innermost thoughts and ponderings in the hope that you will read, ponder, meditate upon and inwardly digest and pass it on to someone who just might have the power, connections and influence to help change this poor sick and weary world that we all share together.

Stars

I got the idea for this post from a friend yesterday, whom I will not name but I am sending him this once it's written.  We were walking downtown near an area that is supposed to be a star magnet and I was asked if I had encountered any.  I replied that no, I have not and even if I saw them I likely wouldn't recognize them.  Nothing against stars, by the way, Hollywood, rock or other, but I'm just not in the know about these things.  I don't see movies much and when I do they are usually foreign, indy or art house (yes, Gentle Reader, I am a snob)

Do I have anything against stars?  No.  Am I envious?  No.  Do I care?  Not really.  I mentioned to my friend, with what I thought was gentle sarcasm, that really everyone is a star.  Most of us just don't get paid for it.  I had a conversation like this once many years ago when I was twenty-one with a co-worker at a construction site where I was working at the time.  I mentioned after talking about a movie about famous jazz singer Billy Holliday, Lady Sings the Blues, that really I didn't see what the big deal was about her or Diana Ross who portrayed her.  When you really think of it, everyone suffers and everyone is a hero even if they don't get recognition or credit for it.  My co-worker didn't quite agree.

I have been inspired many times over by people I have known, ordinary anonymous people who will never be remembered sung or written about: by single mothers successfully raising their children in less than friendly circumstances; by mental health sufferers bravely facing not only their illness but public and social stigma in their quest to live their lives on their own terms and to flourish; by people, often of modest means, giving of their money, their time, their hearts and their lives to support and advocate for the homeless and for people with disabilities; by those spiritually gifted individuals who always know exactly what to say to comfort and encourage others when they are facing death or grieving over the loss of people they love; of people living in poverty and refusing to view themselves as poor while they develop and exploit their creative, spiritual and humanistic gifts.  I could go on...

In a way we are also all stars in our own personal movie: sometimes a drama, or a comedy, or a horror film, or a romance, or often all of the above.  Every day we rewrite the script and so we cope in the cruel grey anonymity of ordinary life.

Of course we need our stars and our heroes.  We are often bottomless chasms in perpetual need of inspiration: be they Hollywood royalty, rock and roll royalty or British royalty.  Unaware that each of us is a star we feed parasitically off of borrowed charisma.  There is nothing at all wrong with being inspired and it is perfectly legitimate to look beyond ourselves for inspiration and role-modelling.  I think we also need to learn to discriminate between what has value and what doesn't.  There is in our society an astounding lack of values and ethics and this turns many of us into amoral mannequins wearing whatever horrid tacky rag that the ruling zeitgeist dictates to be in fashion.

We are all stars, we are all heroes and we are all royalty.  Now we just need to learn how to behave.
I am reminded here of one of my few brushes with famous people.  I was showing a number of my paintings in a Yaletown café, some twenty years ago.  A young man walking two Irish setter dogs looked inside the café and loudly declared to me how much he loves my art.  I graciously said thank you and wished him a lovely day.  Then he left.  Who was he? David Duchovny, also known as Fox Mulder from the TV show the X Files.  By the way, I still have never seen one single episode of the X Files, though I am still thinking of seeing it on Youtube.  And until a few moments later when someone told me who that was I didn't have a clue.  And you know something, Gentle Reader?  I still don't care.

Buddhist Babble

One of my readers sent me this very lovely quote from Buddhist nun Pema Chodron: "if your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that's endlessly interesting and alive.  The quality isn't inherent in the place but in your state of mind.  The warrior longs to communicate that all of us have access to our basic goodness and that genuine freedom comes from going beyond labels and projections, beyond bias and prejudice, and taking care of each other."

I think this is a great explanation of the concept of mindfulness, an idea that I embraced many years before it became au courant.  I recall around ten years ago when one of my many supervisors was explaining to us mindfulness.  I replied that this is something I've been doing for years only I call it prayer.  But it's a particularly intense, concentrated form of prayer.  One day while walking-I think I was just twenty-four then-I was contemplating that matter is really just a form of highly organized energy.  Then came the idea that God is at the heart of every molecule and every atom of not only our human existence but of all matter in the universe, that it is God who holds together and maintains the dynamic motion of every cosmic particle.  As I was walking (I was around Sixteenth and Heather here in Vancouver) I was suddenly caught up in a very exultant state of heightened spiritual awareness of God occupying every detail of every detail of the universe and of my own tiny and finite human  existence. 

I did not call it mindfulness.  I didn't know what to call it, but my appreciation of everything was suddenly and inalterably heightened and elevated.  I don't know if this is the same thing as the Buddhist, or Sufi, or (pick any one) experience.  Even though I respect and appreciate other faiths, my experience and framework are uniquely Christian.  The words of this Buddhist nun certainly resonate and I think we will always have things to learn from and to teach one another.  Or at least we can confirm one another's experience and perhaps help elucidate.

I think that if we approach life in a spirit of joyous humility we will never stop learning because we have made ourselves open and vulnerable to every teacher that comes our way and with this attitude we will always be discovering teachers.

The End Of The World (And We Don't Know It)

For a while today I found myself worrying and stressing over our world situation, all the conflicts happening, the uncertainty, climate change through global warming, North Korea becoming increasingly belligerent over their developing nuclear arsenal, the possibility of Donald Trump as the next US president, Isis in the Middle East, poverty, food insecurity, escalating housing and food costs, homelessness and criminally-low and stagnant wages here in Canada, one of the world's really wealthy nations, the unstoppable arrogance of the One Percent, but for the recently leaked Panama Papers, and on it goes.  This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

Are things any less safe or more uncertain than they used to be?  Well, we did survive World War II but then the alarm was sounded in the fifties about possible nuclear annihilation, in the sixties about environmental pollution, in the seventies came our first taste of global terrorism, with the Grey Wolves and the Red Brigade and the PLO, in the eighties the ozone layer was about to dissolve leaving us to fry to death as the earth morphed into a gigantic microwave oven, in the nineties it was determined that global warming caused by human activities would bring on the apocalypse and now in the early Twenty-First Century we are all paralyzed by fear.  The gulf between rich and poor grows ever wider in the affluent west.  In other countries they say that the middle class is growing but last I heard, Carlos Eslim, the world's wealthiest billionaire is still living in one of those emerging economies, Mexico.

I am going to suggest here that it is a moot point that things are really all that much worse here on Planet Earth.  In some ways they could even be a bit better than ever, if we can make it through climate change from global warming, that is.  I think that the real problem is to be found in three little words:  Too Much Information.

We are the most connected and informed generation ever in World history.  Thanks to internet technology we will know within a nanosecond everything that is happening on the other side of the world.  A generation ago we had just TV and radio to rely on and they were also pretty fast but still moved at a snail's pace by comparison.  Three generations ago it was telegraph.  Six generations ago they had to wait for the mail to arrive by steamship.  Ten generations ago they had to wait for the mail to arrive by frigate.  Our species has occupied this earth for some one hundred and fifty thousand years.  Twelve thousand years ago we invented agriculture and then we slowly became civilized. In the past twenty years we have had home internet and all the instantaneous news to frighten, terrify and paralyze us.

Is the world really going to hell in a hand basket?  To quote the Great Bugs Bunny, "Nyaah...Could be."  Or maybe not.  I think we have just become so oversaturated with news as passive recipients that many of us have come to feel like vulnerable helpless victims unable to do a blessed thing to improve or change things.  And who can enjoy the present moment and the daily mundane joys of life without feeling guilty, or really, with all this anxiety and fear, who can enjoy anything at all?  Yet, the real secret of coping isn't by trying to change the world but in letting ourselves enjoy the present mundane moment.  In Buddhist Babble it is called "Mindfulness".  Whatever you want to call it, it works.  The taste of good food, the presence of a friend, of a loved one, a walk in the forest, in a park or on the beach, a nap, writing a poem, singing, drawing or painting, playing an instrument, being kind, especially being kind to strangers, laughter and humour.  All these little acts of enjoyment, creativity, and generosity might not solve the world's problems, but maybe they will.  As we slow down, calm down, enjoy the gift of the present moment and take better care of others and ourselves we are really committing a subversive act.  We are disassociating ourselves from the toxic machine and we are creating alternatives and dare I say that we are also creating a community of resistance and change.

One step at a time.  And we will do it with joy.

Saying Goodbye

This post is about death, so, if you are a bit squeamish around this subject then please read on and hopefully reading this will help you get over your discomfort.  I mentioned in a post recently in my blog from Bogota, Colombia, that the theme of death was very much present with me, having recently turned sixty, I suppose, but also feeling rather vulnerable being alone in an unsafe city in South America.  I had an overwhelming sense of the mortality that binds, embraces and unites us all.  And, yes, Gentle Reader, we are all going to die, and for this reason we are called to live intensely, as though each day is our last, while greeting each new day when we awake with a song of thanksgiving and joy.

I am thinking of my mother's death, Joyce Alaire Greenlaw (nee Gentner) twenty-five years ago at the age of sixty, my age now.  Here is a posthumous portrait I painted of her in 2007



I remember our last conversation.  She was dying from lung cancer in hospital.  Following a movie, Edward Scissorshands, I went to see her, knowing that in her words she was "going down fast."  Her breathing was very laboured and she seemed scarcely conscious.  We chatted for a while and I told her about a dream I'd had the previous night.  Basically we were having lunch together on a restaurant patio in a European country.  We were drinking white wine.  She asked me what the dream meant.  I replied that everything was well between us and we could part as friends.  She seemed pleased and relaxed.  I kissed her on the forehead and went home.  One of the nurses asked me if I wanted to sit by her bed for the night.  I knew that I needed to sleep and somehow I felt okay about not staying and so did Mom.  When I arrived the next day in the early afternoon she had already been dead for forty-five minutes.  I went over to her bed and again kissed her forehead.  I didn't see her die, but we parted as friends and I knew that where she was, that she was well.

I have no doubts about an afterlife.  I remember when a couple of years earlier the wife of a friend died from melanoma and another friend and I both prayed together for her soul.  I had a vision of her as a much younger woman, or girl rather, of fourteen or so.  She was wearing brown and white peasant garb (remember Holly Hobby anyone?), had long flowing hair (in life her hair was always cut short) and she was running through beautiful meadows surrounded by trees, uphill, smiling joyously with her arms stretched out before her.  The following day her widower, my friend, came over to visit and told me that a friend of his I had never met before had a vision about his wife.  Detail by detail he described exactly the vision that I had had yesterday about his wife. 

I have no doubt at all.  I do know that it is important that we forgive, pardon and reach out to one another in a spirit of love and reconciliation.  This life is very short, but a breath or two and then we are gone.  This life is short, but how we live in this life and especially the way we treat one another is going to have a huge bearing on how we are going to spend eternity.