Morningside: Memories, second thoughts, and why we shouldn’t have heroes

 

So what happens when your hero turns out to have feet of clay?

Well – is there any  other kind? Isn’t this realization a kind of punishment for the sin of having a hero in the first place?

This all goes back a long way, so bear with me, please. It was back in the 1980s, and I was living in Hinton, a small town in Alberta in the foothills of the Rockies. Like a lot of people, I was a huge fan and rabid listener to Morningside, that folksy, down-home, ultra-Canadian radio program which ran for three hours every weekday (with a cornball ten-minute drama tacked on at the end, which now seems utterly cringeworthy, but there you go. This was CULTURE,  and the drama  even provided that all-important “Canadian content”.)

Of course, at the helm of Morningside was one Peter Gzowski, always presented as an avuncular nice-guy, friendly, down-to-earth, and only stirred to ire if anyone dared question his rabid Canadianism. He seemed to champion local stories, pride in your small-town community, tales of everyday heroism, people heroically struggling with serious health conditions, and predictably dull interviews with Literary Figures, the usual round of third-string Canadian novelists who were making a wee splash with their latest book.

Now it seems painfully parochial, awfully small-time, but  then, at least where I lived, it was a very big deal. I even began to send in some of my short pieces, and did backflips of  delight when some of them were actually being read on the air. It never occurred to me I was giving stuff away when I should have been asking for the dignity of some sort of recompense. This was MORNINGSIDE, the champion of the small-scale Canadian author! How crass were you to even think of - ? But the utter glory of hearing Gzowski cough and wheeze his way through the piece was supposed to be enough. Certainly, my small-town neighbors in Hinton were thrilled I was getting so  much national exposure.  At that point, I had a weekly column in my local paper, but back then, newspaper columns were read today, and used to wrap  fish tomorrow.

After a  while, a friend of mine began to get HER pieces read on the air, so we sort of banded together, keeping an eye on each other, of course, but mostly cheering each other on. Then there was The Morningside Papers,  a series of books made up of all those donated bits of folksy stories, thrill-packed adventures in tiny towns, and even a few moderately-more-serious topics. My first piece in the Papers was a  thrill, as was the second and third. My friend Amber also had quite a few of her own writings in the Papers, and at one point we had a champagne celebration that was covered in the  Hinton Parklander. Fame at last!

But the BIG one for me was being asked to  appear on the  show to respond  to a man who had written a rather lame folk song about the Great Hinton Train Crash.

It wasn’t that big a deal when it happened, but it was prime Gzowksi  material, small-towny, folksy, of the earth, of  the Common  (of course, Canadian) Man. So I got on there and talked  to the guy, who hummed and hawed  and  said  that, actually, no, he knew nothing at all about Hinton and only read about  the crash in the newspapers. I was especially incensed when he  referred to our  glorious community as “a sleepy little pulp-mill town”. I had  a few word s to say about THAT.

It made for good radio, or OK radio, though of course there was no recompense except the shining glory of being ON Morningside! My small-town friends were ecstatic, and I actually got a few gigs on Edmonton radio as a result (and by the holy, they PAID me, though not very much. At least they didn’t shame me for asking.).

At one point, a new producer came on-board, and I recognized him as Glen Allen, a man who wrote a truly hair-raising series for Morningside on getting sober. This was his Detox Diary, first-person, present-tense journal entries (Day One, Day Two, etc.), written in what now sounds like rather purplish prose, It was “You Are There” stuff, recounting his physical breakdown as a result of floods of booze, cigarettes and pills. “My liver is as big as a house” was one  memorable phrase, as was his insistence “I loved  booze  more than some people love each other. What a time it has been! The rye and  ginger years, the rum years, and then the discovery of Russian vodka, the Ultimate Weapon, the sweet sting of the steppes rising from the bottles with the strange-sounding names. Taken neat, it was strong enough to run a tractor.” If any of this seems creepily detached from the reality of vomiting blood in a detox ward, then you’re right, it IS creepy and actually irresponsibly dramatic. By the end of it, on Day 12 or whatever, he’s citing  a psychiatric nurse who described him as “superficial, infantile, and lost in life.”

I should have listened.

Because he was so honest and courageous (confessing he left little glasses of vodka all over the house, so that “passing from  room to room, travelling by the Stations of the Cross, I would never be far from good cheer”), he was deemed a hero. He was confessing all this on public radio - reading his pieces himself, of course, not in Gzowki’s wheezy baritone. Back then, before social media and reality TV exposed the public’s blatant schadenfreude, the myth was that the more you “shared” this harrowing stuff, the better for the public good. And, of course, it couldn’t help but help YOU in your “journey”. So  everyone thought.

So Glen landed the gig. He was “in” with Gzowski, and thus with Morningside, though, as was typical with him, he lasted less than a year.

I  was actually kind of riveted by his Detox Diaries, and when they appeared in the Morningside Papers, I  wanted to get in touch with him. Oh yes, and I also wanted to run some things by him for  the show, which worked after a  fashion. They used maybe ten per cent of what I sent in, and Glen let me in on the fact Gzowski thought I was  a nuisance and wished I would go away. But what I was to learn about Glen Allen should have turned some lights on.

He was the  son of Ralph Allen, whom I had  never heard of, but who was fabled as some sort of  founding father of Canadian journalism. And Gzowski  idolized him to the point of sainthood, if not godhood. The fact Allen died in his 50s from smoking  and drinking just added to his mythology. So here was his son Glen, fresh off those astonishingly self-revealing and unnecessarily graphic  pieces about booze (not a confessional, but "a last letter to a lost love", he called them) that he read on the  air – and Gzowksi began to rhapsodize about him, calling  him a “shy and courtly writer” and “one of the finest journalists in Canada”. He was a fine writer when he was able to  sit up and tap at a typewriter, but a lot of the time he was, by his own admission, face-down.

 It was a strange sort of bromance, with Gzowski constantly trying to pump Glen for stories – any stories, anything at all – about his hero. He didn’t want to play, making it clear his father was horribly cruel to him and they never got along. Gzowski  even claimed that trying to squeeze Ralph Allen stories out of his son was like “a tongue probing the exposed nerve of a tooth.”  He also described “the smile that ignites his face”, though he was disappointed that this odd facial blaze reminded Gzowski  of his mother rather than his hero Ralph.

As a producer, Glen Allen lasted barely one season, but by this  time he  was truly encouraging my writing  and even urging me to try to sell some of it. I eventually did get gigs with  the Edmonton Journal, and eventually wrote for papers all over the country, including the Montreal Gazette and the Globe  and  Mail. Would I have gone ahead with it without  Glen’s promptings? Yes, I would, but it was still kind of nice. In the fullness of time, I wrote five novels (well, five and a half)  and published three - with publishers, folks, real ones, not the other kind. If my timing had been different, who knows, I might have sat there inhaling all that toxic second-hand smoke.

Starting with me, of course, Glen and I began to write to each other, and this correspondence (pen to paper, with envelopes and stamps  - this was the old days) went on, on and off at least, for nearly ten years. We shared a lot about certain mutual struggles – I gave up drinking and joined AA when I was 36, realizing it was doing terrible  damage to my loved ones and my life. And like Glen, I had fallen down the mental illness rabbit hole when I was only in my teens.

You have to understand how people idolized Glen’s  writing. It was, as I was to realize later, writing that calls attention to itself, inciting “ooooohs” and “ahhhhhhs” from the audience, like watching a fireworks display. But it would have helped if he had stuck to facts and not resorted to so much embellishment and  florid storytelling, which I now see as unnecessarily manipulative. “Respect your readers” should be the first law of journalism.

I was to find out later that Gzowksi  had pulled a lot of the same shit, doing just about anything (including staging  disaster scenes  to boost his reputation as a reporter) to get famous. I  was also to find out later that he privately groused about me because I was only sending my pieces in  to  get exposure on the radio. Horrors! A writer wants people to hear them? And to even think about being paid was even more reprehensible.

But back to Glen, and the fact that his commitment to sobriety was shaky at best. I was also to  learn he had bipolar disorder and had crashed completely at the time of his detox diaries. To hear him talk  about it, his life at that time was a smoking ruin, he had no job, his family was hanging by a thread, and he was close to actual death, but here was Gzowski, idolizing his dead Dad and willing to do anything  to squeeze information out of him. 

So he was hired.

 A few years later, when Gzowski  retired from Morningside, Glen wrote a long newspaper piece about his ten-month stint on the show (which actually was about average for him sticking  at anything). The piece was called “In the Spirit of Eros” – “eros” as in “erotic”. I will try not to read too much into that, but added to the tongue probing at an aching tooth, you’ve  got to wonder.

Some of his letters were beautiful  in that  powerful storytelling  way he had, but there was always  a smokescreen, a sense he wasn’t  being very truthful and that it was all from some sort of strange arm’s length. He did land in detox again because he was swallowing  benzodiazepines like candy, and I never had the sense he really became a part of AA, just went to meetings, sat at the back, then bolted out the  door. He never had a home group and was "terrified" to get a sponsor, presumably because he wasn't putting too many sober days back-to-back.

In those ten years, he  worked at five different jobs in three provinces. Newspapers, magazines, radio. He even did a short stint at Macleans magazine, which his legendary father had founded. (Glen was totally obsessed with this man who had treated him so shabbily, and referred to him in almost all his letters.)  I could  not keep  track, and he never provided a  home address. I didn’t  pry, because he was supposedly intensely private in spite of his detox True Confessions. He had a  “companion”, but never gave a name. I did wonder sometimes if it was a man or a woman, though ultimately I don’t think it mattered, because nothing ever lasted with him.

Then the trail went cold. He stopped answering  me, perhaps taking off on another adventure somewhere – he constantly talked about “hitting the road again”, and “hiding out”. In the fullness of time I realized he had dragged his wife  and small children all over the world, each gig lasting  a year or two. Many of these countries, such as Chile and China, were not  even English-speaking, which makes me wonder if he really did care about his children and their wellbeing. It seemed utterly selfish to me that a man who was supposedly so lavishly gifted had to keep hopping  around as if his feet never touched the ground. 

Then it  stopped, the trail went cold, Morningside ended - but not after a final piece of  mine appeared in the last Morningside Papers. But there was something wrong at the end of it.  Something awful.

The name of my town was listed as KINRON, Alberta. Kinron. There IS no Kinron, such a place does not exist, and to make matters worse, I  had already been ON the show doing an interview from Hinton.  No one seemed to think this small gaffe meant anything. No, not to folksy, small-towny, parochial Morningside! Why should I be so  upset, when they were generous enough to select my writings for the show?

KINRON.

Ultimately, I heard Gzowski  had died of emphysema, after writing an astonishing detox diary of his own – claiming he was in rehab for smoking. I have never heard of such a thing, but to his last gasp  he never admitted to his alcoholism. He was as destructive a drinker as Glen, but much less honest about it. It was only later that I found out about his “secret son”, a child  he had fathered with an anonymous woman, only to keep paying him off to  keep his mouth shut.

Funny,  because the same thing happened with Glen. He told a harrowing story (to  me, anyway – to  him it was just reporting) about moving in with a woman he barely knew, fathering a child with her, then leaving when the baby was only six months old. He put all his things in a garbage bag and sneaked out, likely in the middle of the night, never to return.

Yes, he was an afflicted soul, but as he was to claim years later in another harrowing You Are There piece (about getting  shock treatments in a psych ward), this was one of those long stretches when he insisted he was perfectly well and totally functional. He claimed to only experience a bout of mental illness every ten years or so, with “eight or nine trouble-free years” in between, before "the demons came calling" again. When they finally did, the shock treatments he wrote about made him euphoric, and the newspaper piece he published made him seem positively giddy, enraptured by the sudden bright colors, the murmuring of friendly voices (psych nurses) and the pleasant ticking of a clock. To  someone who is bipolar, this is NOT good news.

By the time I read that piece, he was dead by his own hand. Hospitalized again, the fifth or sixth  time in three provinces in two years, he took  an overdose washed down with beer, wandered away from the psych ward into a freezing Toronto  winter, and froze to death by the railroad tracks. There was even a police report about  a “missing man”, showing someone who did not look like Glen at all, skeletal, with glazed eyes and a front  tooth knocked out.

I know how I am supposed to feel about all this. In fact, it seems horribly cruel to feel any other way. Compassion, even pity, and huge admiration for his courage in describing how the doctor glued electrodes to his skull and flipped the switch, sending a jolt of electricity through “the addled spheres of my brain”.

But the piece was written with a lot  of mythologizing  and glib phrasing that somehow held it all away  at a safe distance, while pulling the reader in, forcibly, with that inevitable first-person, present-tense style he loved to use.

I know it was an awful death, and I can kind of see why he needed to write about the shock treatments, but this idea that spilling your guts is always  a good thing has aged like milk. I am sure most people reading his psych ward diary were taken aback  - even I was, and I knew the man well enough to know this wasn’t the first time. Nor did he need to recount every single one of his bizarre manic episodes, in which he heard jabbering foreign voices in his head, hired a film crew for a non-story on corrupt bankers in Montreal, hallucinated seeing his dead father in elevators, went on  several wild hitchhiking trips in Northern Alberta, and believed the Mafia was after him.

This seemed a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia to me than bipolar, but maybe he was both. The weird dissociative thing pushed it all outside himself. When he wrote about an accident after a bad drunk, he said “an arm was paralyzed, and stayed that way for  a month.” AN arm, not HIS arm. Another time, he cut “an arm” with a broken bottle. And the poetic ramblings in between were what we writers call “making story”, We don’t ever let mere facts get in the way.

I don’t know why all this has come back to  me now, except I think I do. I am not at all sure the health problems I am struggling with now are going to be survivable. It’s not looking good. So is this bizarre death from 20 years ago  haunting  me because my  own death is imminent? And what will that be like? Can it be any worse than what happened to Glen?

Gzowski  wheezed out his last in a cardiac ward in 2002, and Glen lay down and died like a homeless man three years later, having literally run away from a psychiatric ward. I see him now as running and running, even during those long stretches of “trouble-free years” he claimed to have. He fathered a child during one of those stretches, then abandoned his daughter and a single mother with no means of support.

So  do I forgive all this because he was “mentally ill”? He was, but so am I, technically, living with bipolar  disorder which has come close to finishing me many times. When I tried to share some of my mental health struggles on Morningside, the pieces were treated like dead rats. You had to be the son of a hero to get away with that.

So I’ve done a lot of things to try to shake this off. Morningside now seems embarrassing to  me, not just small-time but totally hypocritical, willing to mangle the name of one of those quaint small towns we all were supposed to celebrate, even after featuring many of my writings and even an interview from  my home  town which was on the air.

KINRON.

Yes, Kinron, which is “nowhere”, and in a way Glen was Nowhere Man, but it seemed like self-exile to  me, and during those supposed (self-reported) long, long stretches of sobriety and stability, what was his  excuse for yanking his small children all over the globe, never letting them settle anywhere, and abandoning an infant daughter? The suicide attempts he so willingly recounted were all very public – he  jumped in front of a bus in Montreal, he took pills in New Brunswick and waited for the  tide to carry him out (resulting in a coma), then ended up in Toronto as the “missing man”, frozen to death beside the railroad tracks. These attempts all had something in common. They were extremely public, and were all geared towards finding his dead body in  a very public place. Being a newspaperman, he knew all about getting the story, and he knew in each case it would invariably  get into the papers (he was a public figure, after all), and his family would be approached for comment. As if they hadn’t gone through enough hell already.

 So I have a lot of anger mixed in with the pity and bafflement, and I now see his “diaries” as sensationalistic and far too graphic to be of any real help to  anyone. In the final analysis, I don't even think it helped him. We don’t need to hear about the technician “plunging a needle into a ready vein”, knocking him out, gluing electrodes to his skull, flipping the switch like something out of a Frankenstein movie. He even phrased it, “And out I am in this fourth of eight shock treatments at New Brunswick General Hospital.” Out I am? This takes his usual, attention-grabbing (if not lapel-grabbing) “you are there” to a  whole new, ghastly level. How can you SAY you’re “out” if you are indeed unconscious?

Someone should have blocked the publication of this piece, particularly when it was reprinted after he  died. At very least, he should have waited to write it after the course of treatment was finished he was only at the halfway mark) and he came back down to earth. Someone should have taken him aside, but no one did, because the writing was so impressive. He worked at that. He did die rather horribly, and I grieved, and kept all his letters for a long time, until I couldn’t  any more and decided I needed to dump  the whole subject, but since writing is my way of making SOME  sort of sense of my life, I’ve  needed to do this now. Morningside, with its faux-folksy host  (with the secret son) and Son of the Legend (with the secret daughter) now make me feel a little queasy. That was then, of course, and this is now, the only now I have.  There’s a Cole Porter song which keeps coming into my head: aptly, it’s called Every Time we Say Goodbye, and one of its more memorable lines is, “But how strange the change/From major  to minor.”

Yes, when the fog lifts and the lights come on and the Frankenstein scenario is finally over, things definitely slide into  a minor  key. If anyone actually reads this, and I am a fool to  think anyone will bother, no doubt I’ll get blasted for NOT having warm, fuzzy, folksy memories of Morningside and Peter Gzowski,  everyone’s jovial favourite uncle. But  Kinron. And all those pieces, when I did not  yet realize it was OK  for a  writer to actually try to  make  a living with their skills. For even thinking about being paid, I was roundly shamed  and branded an opportunist.

I  won’t do my usual thing and break this up with photos or  images or whatever, because I’m too tired right now, I’m exhausted from treatments of my own (though no  electrodes are glued to my skull). A lot of  time has passed, more than half my life, and an awful  lot of this stuff has aged very poorly. For  the most part, though there are likely a few diehards, Gzowski is no  longer seen as the folksy hero, his endless wheezy chain-smoking and equally-endless drinking starting to make him look kind of shabby. No doubt Ralph Allen was a nasty piece of work (smoking and drinking himself to death as well), a narcissist who made everyone think it was a privilege to  work for him. Glen - poor lost Glen - was doing himself in steadily through most of  his 65 years. Yes, he kept a record, but  though his writing was praised for its “oooooohh”, “ahhhhhhhh” factor, I see through all of those tricks now.

There’s a not very nice name for these attention-seekers in this  age of internet fame and infamy. Yes, those were different times, but not THAT different. Don’t pretend to be this shy, private person  who only spills his guts (FOR PAY, by the way – he was paid for everything he did on Morningside – son  of the Legend, after all!)  for the public good. What he wrote did not reduce the stigma or “raise awareness”. It had shock value, and as  a seasoned writer, he knew it did and chose it deliberately. But gut-lurching shock is not a public service. It’s a deliberate demand for attention, sympathy and even pity, and though he no doubt was treated like a hero for it, there was always something in it for him. If nothing else, it got him another job when he had crashed in flames once again.

So  don’t have heroes. They have feet of clay, as we  all do. I hope the public is at least a little more sophisticated now, a little more skeptical. I suppose when I heard my pieces read on the air, it did give  me a momentary thrill, and made me a teeny-tiny celebrity  in my sleepy  little  pulp mill town.

HINTON, folks. Not Kinron. Kinron does not exist.

BOUDOIR DOLLS: A Fad of the 1920s

I barely remember posting this, and I have no idea where I found the images! But they're gorgeous,and I note that many of them are posing rather seductively. Women collected these dolls and heaped them up on their beds, for some reason. The bodies were extremely thin, but the outfits were often elaborate and reflected the exoticism of movies starring Rudolph Valentino.

It's nice that someone finallly found this video and commented on it. I'm trying to get away from the disease of "like, subscribe, leave a comment", and all the other things  that take all the fun out of YouTube. Now it's a moneymaking proposition, plus a forum for conspiracy theories. Meantime, enjoy these boudoir dolls! 

A-meow-deus! Brilliant parody of Amadeus WITH CATS!

At last, a useful application for AI! This guy is a genius and stars his own cats in his animations. They keep getting better and better (and A-meow-deus even has that crazy laugh!)

💥Prince Harry: DANCE PARTY!💥

What can I say? I guess I don't need to say anything. Harry is an idiot, he can't dance, he doesn't even know where he is or who he is. And apparently, he has plans to move back to the UK! Smart move? This guy does not even have half a functioning brain. But he has Meghan! Stay tuned for more idiocy.

Baby's First Birthday (OK, it's me!)

 

BABY’S FIRST BIRTHDAY: She has a Whole Cake to Herself!

OK, I’ll admit it – this is me at age one. For some reason my family allowed me to dive into my birthday cake, and after initial hesitation I went for it.  Before YouTube, even before home video, this became a photo essay that passed into family legend. I thought these photos were lost forever, then rediscovered them in an album at a family reunion. Please note: after I had my way with the cake, my mother scraped all the icing off and re-iced it, and it was ready to serve.

The sun comes up. . .

 

OK  then, this is probably the last thing I should be doing, but it's a great song, illustrates how immobilizing an obsession can be, and of  course has that refrain, "losing my mind" (somehow, very relevant to this whole glorious mess). That last line, "You said you loved me" is a primal wail of  grief, which could only be expressed by someone who has been there and done  that.

So what do I conclude here? Nothing, except that it's a great song by a great songwriter, and it does  express something I've never heard expressed quite like this before. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not  going right. 

I have not yet given up on the return of my own sanity, which has been compromised at various points, but never entirely lost. But that other issue. . . yes, he WAS lost, and lost himself in a way that in retrospect looks like his life's ambition from  the start. Cruel? Yes, but so is this obsession, and I want to be rid of it.  Why can't the dead stay dead? Particularly if it happened 20 years ago, and the meaningful part, FORTY years ago.  That's a long time to be immobilized.

Only love can do that. Or can it?

 

Only love can do that.

Only love.

 But love costs. Does it not, and is that not why I still find myself struggling?

Struggling in a bizarre sort of struggle I want to be free of, because it seems pointless, not to mention a little (a lot) disturbing.

 Why am I unable to oust these thoughts? They’re not hate exactly, though I sometimes find myself trying to whip up a storm of hate to drive these thoughts OUT of my head. But then my favourite King quote came back into  my mind.

 I’ve gone over it and over it until I want to just push the entire thing away forever. Someone died under horrible circumstances, more than twenty years ago now. It was a tragic, even macabre death. It was someone I thought I knew, though we never met. We corresponded for about ten years, and no doubt I saw only an idealized version of him (and vice-versa), though at times what he said to  me was very dark indeed.

 So is it working, this trying to work it out, to address it directly rather than keep trying to shove it into a black closet at the back of my mind and bolting the door?

 He was too good at words. It was a smokescreen, sometimes a swagger. He was playing a role that wasn’t really him. From his early photos, I’ve pretty much determined he was not so much bipolar as schizo-affective, his bouts of  mental illness so extreme he heard a cacophony of  voices jabbering in his head in different languages, believed his mother was a German spy, and at one point thought the Mafia was after him.

 And he ran, and ran, and ran, from job to job, relationship to relationship, always trying to outrun something in himself, or some awareness of who he really was. Are these guesses? Maybe, but based on something I sussed out,  both from those expressions (like Brian Wilson, in his own little internal universe, and Howard Hughes at the end, a scarecrow out of his mind whose reality bore no relation to anyone  else’s).

 Does this help? Of course it doesn’t, but what can I do? We first “met” (never did meet in person)   on the phone, and that was more than forty years ago. Forty. Is it the fact that everyone I knew from that time in my life is now dead? Or something else?

Only love can do that. Do what? Isn’t love more killing than hate? Sometimes. It does strange things to the mind. It can blind you to certain things. More macabre than the manner of his self-imposed death was the fact there was a police report I somehow found online (HOW? Where? How did I even know he had died?) It described  someone I barely recognized, a skeletal, even spectral version of himself, emaciated, a front tooth knocked out, eyes glazed and staring. This wasn’t the same man, or was THIS the real man, and all those other incarnations the imposters?

As I write this, I listen to Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, an exquisite, sylvan meditation which you would never know on first listening was meant to commemorate the tragic deaths of six of his dearest friends, cut down in their prime in World War I. The pieces are wistful, playful, tender, sometimes downright jubilant, with a sense of birdsong and morning dawning against the odds. And this, to mark all those deaths, those irrevocable losses. So I listen to this, to try to do what?

I don’t want to be taken over, I don’t want to think about things that happened or didn’t, forty years ago, or thirty, or twenty. This is NOW, and hard as now is, and it IS hard or I wouldn’t be writing this – so why is my now  so polluted by memories or images or even words he wrote, the words I read so  many times they’ve become seared into my consciousness? Isn’t it bad enough I often think I’m going to die fairly soon, that the cancer they think they “got” is just lying in wait? Must it be compounded by this – what? His bizarre, even grotesque means of suicide – why do I even allow  ONE such thought in my head?

Why can’t I turn this off? I have tried everything. This is just the latest exercise in futility. I  don’t know now if the man was ever truly well, for as a boy he was already experiencing bizarre, frightening symptoms, and was given unanesthetized shock treatments at the age of fifteen, a barbaric practice which never should have been allowed. Then they did it again when he was sixty, all wrong for very similar reasons, and it could not possibly “work” the way he insisted it did the first time.

Worked, meaning – what? Even in his letters, he constantly fantasized about running away. Hitting the road. Hiding out. He literally used the word “hide” a lot. From what? From something in himself? He wrote a tell-all about  his mental illness and these shock treatments, which was gruesomely graphic and probably not helpful to anyone. It was almost ludicrous in its first-person, present-tense, “you are there” approach, grabbing the reader by the lapels and forcefully pulling them into the story  until your face is right up against his. like it or not. A way of capturing your audience and forcing them to bear witness. Horrible, really, but that’s how it was.

And by rights, as with so many other people I’ve loved and lost, this story should have faded by now, and I have no idea why it has come back with such force. What is it trying to tell me? If I was still into the spiritualism I now see as incredibly naïve and even self-serving, the answer to that would be unendurable. I DO NOT want to be “haunted” by anyone or anything. The thought of it is beyond horrible.

Then what? Why can’t love drive out hate, or hate drive out love, or however it actually goes? About six times an hour, the thoughts break in or just appear. I try hard to push them away, to banish them, and sometimes they seem to actually, physically recede into the distance, always on the left side – and what is that about? When I was in therapy trying to deal with a childhood and adolescence of unspeakable traumatic abuse, I felt like there was a wall, almost an  actual, physical barrier on my left side, almost right up against my face, and on the other side of that wall were the horrors. I had thought the wall had been dismantled decades ago after a hell of a lot of hard work and expense. But here it is  again.  This sense it all dwells in an actual, physical location.

I am haunted by what it was like for the family, being told he had literally run away from a psych ward, full of pills and (very sadly, but it also makes me angry) booze. He just wanted to be found in a very public way, so that it would be written about and published. As a newspaperman, he knew that was how it would go down. His macabre attempt to  drown himself was similar, and that left him in  a coma and with brain damage. He wasn’t even very good at dying, obviously, though in the end of course, it gets us all, whether we’re good at it or not.

So did I love him? I thought I did. That song by Stephen Sondheim repeats and repeats in my  mind: “The sun comes up. I think about you. The coffee cup. I think about you. I want you so, it’s like I’m losing my mind.” Then the melancholy chorus: “All afternoon doing every little chore, the thought of you stays bright. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not going right.”

Immobilized, and by what? Surely this can’t be “love”, though I thought I loved him, or loved his words, which I now see were another kind of hiding place. It was writing which calls attention to itself: fireworks, ooooh, ahhhhh, verbal pyrotechnics guaranteed to impress the audience with its vividness. I call bullshit here, because I know all the  writer’s tricks and see through them all. I  want to say: GET TO THE POINT. I wonder, have always wondered, what exactly happened to him when he was a 15-year-old  boy doing manual labor in the far north with a bunch of  drunken grown men. I don’t wonder at all, actually, but I do about his orientation, and if his doctors or (more likely) his parents were actually trying to shock him straight. Such things happened then, probably still do in more primitive parts of the world such as the United States.  If it’s true what I suspect, it was a futile attempt to cure his attraction to men, which never left him and manifested in furtive anonymous  sex in men’s rooms rather than any sort of actual relationship.

He never gave me  a home address through at least five changes of job in ten years, never once spelled out his living arrangements except to refer, very rarely, to a “companion” (female, I assume, because he could not face who he really was). Was he with someone at the end? How did he end up emaciated  and with a front tooth knocked out? A fall, a fight, sheer neglect? Those are horrible details. He was 65, and he wanted to die outside and be found and be written about in the papers, as if his family had  not been through enough of an ordeal. It was all publicly aired, and he knew it would be, like those Morningside pieces I now see as ludicrously swaggering and even full of contempt  for everyone around him.

So what are you to say, what am I to think, was he so far gone he didn’t even know what he was doing, or – something else? A piece he wrote in tribute to Peter Gzowski  was called, bizarrely, In the Spirit of Eros (as in “erotic” – the two had a sort of weird bromance going on), but in reality he was living in the spirit of Thanatos, on a death march that went on for a very long time and ended with a frozen body beside the railroad tracks. Then the family had to be told that, yes, they had  finally found him, but the news wasn’t good.

But I must think of me now. I have worked so hard to be free, to be well, and physical limitations have dogged me for more than a year and a half. I make a conscious decision every day not to allow myself to be depressed. I get myself out, I move, I walk, I eat and breathe. NO DEATH MARCH for me! Life has never been, will never be that. So why won’t this dreadful memory just recede into the grey zone of the deep past?

It’s not happening, and force won’t work, and hate won’t work, but even love won’t  work, because it’s tinged with so much anger and horror. I  am appalled at it now, the selfishness, even if he WAS so sick he barely knew what he was doing. He knew. That sort of death took  planning, and timing, and cunning. It took secreting enough pills to kill him – and beer, for Christ’s sake, where did he get THAT? – and somehow getting all this past the people who were watching him like a hawk on a psychiatric ward.

He wrote  an awful poem about being in a psych ward, wrote it “at”  me because he was angry at me for having a  loving family, accusing me of not appreciating them enough. I wish I could get it out of my mind. It’s his usual poesy, overdramatic, first-person and present-tense, dragging the reader right into the centre of his appalling tragedy. It was as if he was shaking us by the shoulders and screaming that he was in pain, but  what the hell were WE supposed to do about it?

I keep telling myself: OK then, if love won’t  drive it out and hate won’t drive it out and I can’t get away from all this horror no matter how fiercely I battle it, can I just accept that it’s there and  try to live with it? I have to do that with so  many things, including my own addictive tendencies and my bipolar condition. I have to put myself first.

I don’t have friends now, which sometimes shocks me – they are, quite literally, all dead. All the people I cared most deeply about are gone. Stroke, heart attack, cancer, suicide. There’s that word again. A horrible word. Even saying the word makes it thinkable.

So what is the point of all this? Is there one, or did I just feel I had to put this down to give me a sense I have some sort of control here? What will it be like, anyway – dying? Will it just be like going to sleep, or will I go to hell for all eternity for not being the person I was supposed to be – or just for being at all?

Now as I listen, it’s Satie’s Gnossiennes on the piano, sultry, almost sinister, a heartbreak on the keys. But healing somehow, as it acknowledges just what life can be like in extremis. Death can seem preferable, but when I get those sinking feelings, that shadowy feeling I can’t even try to describe, I don’t want to do anything but get away from it. In my better moments, I can even convince  myself I’m going to live, after all. For how long is not so much the question – just “how”. I’ve seen enough beloved people through their own harrowing ends  to know it can be a horrible, horrible thing to  die. You deteriorate and become a bad parody of yourself, until finally you are no more.

So how will it be? And will this wraith, this spectral presence, ever bugger off and leave me alone? Bohdan, if HE wasn’t dead also, would say it’s probably his spirit coming back or whatever, but I cannot live with even the possibility of that.

So I have the music, and my life, such as it is, still precious to me simply because it is mine. It has been a long time coming. I don’t need a reason now. I live, and I suppose I will die, sooner or later, and sometimes I even hope it’s sooner or I will just die in my sleep (and right now, it’s my main ambition and goal). I would rather not be the one to survive, as everyone seems to fear I will and become a burden on everyone. I know that’s what they’re thinking. It’s a subtext in the family. Not so much that they care about me, but that they will be stuck with me.

These aren’t great thoughts, but they are honest, and mine. I did NOT choose a macabre death, at least not so far, though I suppose there were times I wanted to. When he actually died, when he was found and I somehow or other found all those articles in the paper (how?? How did I get hard copies of papers from New Brunswick? How did I find that police report online?), I was barely coming out of my own hellscape, a maelstrom of mental illness that very nearly finished me. My life was about to begin again, but I did not know that then.

That won’t happen this time.

So I am left with the quote, and my doubts about it. Love, hate, aren’t they all the same thing? And the opposite of love isn’t hate  anyway – it’s indifference. Something I have rarely felt about anything.

 But that glazed mental patient in the final photo, eyes like blank staring discs, seemed indifferent to me, hollowed out. The opposite of caring is the absence of caring.

 I can’t end this with any sort of fanciful  amen. I can’t find images to salt it with to break up the monotony of all these paragraphs. I don’t think anyone is going to read it anyway. The only blog posts that get attention now are from ten years ago, when someone stumbles on something I wrote then. Gratifying, but why feed something I should have wound up years and years ago?

 Life isn’t a performance, except it is, because those around you can’t help but see. But they are busy performing as well. Busy with their own grubby little problems, their pettiness. Mine is to take care of myself as well as I can, for as long  as I can. To try to have a reasonably good day, or if it’s a bad one, tell myself that tomorrow will be better.

 Which it usually is. Confounds me, but  that’s just how it is.

Long Black Veil: Why can't I get past this horror?

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, though almost nobody knows about it or pays much attention. For the most part, the best sufferers of mental illness can hope for is pity.

But there is another way, something that might just break through public indifference and scorn, and that is the power of story. This piece ran in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal in 2006. It mourns the death by suicide of my dear friend and comrade Glen Allen, an award-winning journalist and great human being who suffered deeply from the effects of bipolar disorder.

I will not say he "lost the battle" with this sometimes-nightmarish disorder because I think he won, in that he lived for over 60 years, loved and worked and married and had children and wrote and taught and travelled all over the world. Even in the midst of unbelievable pain, he was articulate and wrote with a grace I'll never approach. I'd like to share this article again, just as it went down ten years ago, when my grief was very fresh.

December is long and dark at the best of times, and this year the merriment of Christmas was dulled by a death. When I opened my daily paper to the obituary section, I saw a face that made me gasp, a face I had never actually seen but knew as well as my brother’s. I read the account of his death in disbelief, shocked but not completely surprised that my friend had frozen to death beside some railroad tracks in Toronto, full of pills, after wandering away from a psychiatric ward.

My friend was Glen Allen, newspaperman, Maclean’s correspondent, world traveller, insightful and witty writer, gentle, courageous (and sometimes lost) soul. What brought us together was some ferociously honest writing about alcoholism, and what held us together for years and years was a mutual struggle with various demons. He always wrote about them better than I did. Or so I always thought.

I never knew Glen in the usual sense. I never saw his face. I had heard his voice a number of times, most memorably when he read his Getting Sober and Staying Sober pieces on CBC Radio’s Morningside. I sensed straight-from-the-shoulder directness and convoluted complexity in one person. This man was in pain, and so eerily distanced from the pain that he could write about it in prose that shimmered and shocked and stung. His writer's mind was so alive and focussed as to be almost crystalline, whereas the rest of him seemed to be slouching towards oblivion.

Sometime during his short tenure on Morningside, I began to write to Glen Allen. This guy just had a magical way with words, and seemed like a genuine (and pain-ridden, and large-hearted) human soul. I just had to get in touch with him. I was delighted to get responses, brief at first, then longer and longer, and over time we developed a sort of relationship through the mail. This was in the days of real letters on paper, written by hand, and I always delighted in his vital and elegant script, even if it deteriorated pretty badly towards the end. Often he’d write on beautiful blank cards, and I have one in front of me now, gorgeous sprays of crimson and gold called Flowers for Lord Buddha.

I think my letters must have gone on and on. I could hardly help myself, in those days, since I had no idea what was wrong with me and why I could not settle myself the way everyone else seemed to. But Glen had the same square-peg syndrome, which in his case registered as endearing eccentricity. He had a black lady cat named Imelda (I can’t think of a better cat name, can you?); he was concerned about his future once, and consulted a psychic in the backwoods of New Brunswick; when asked to be a speaker at a meeting, he shared his “experience (long), strength (not much), and hope (I’m going to hang on if it kills me)”.

Ten years is a long time, ten birthdays, ten Easters, ten Christmases. What did we write about? I can barely bring myself to open the file folder that holds all his letters, preserved and precious to me. The stark end of his life has made it impossible But I know we wrote about recovery: from alcoholism (we were both afflicted, and though his sobriety was patchy at best, he genuinely loved AA and treated it with the greatest reverence in his writing), from our parents (both of us had grown up with oppressive, cuttingly sarcastic fathers who withheld affection unless our performance in life was perfect: meaning we were never loved at all), and the worst thing of all, depression, the thousand-pound rock that weighs on the sensitive soul and destroys pleasure and joy and love. Both of us had bench-pressed thousands of pounds over the years, and though he told me his official diagnosis was manic-depression, now rather slickly called "bipolar disorder", I did not realize we shared the same affliction until this past spring, when I experienced what is delicately referred to as an “episode”.

I thought then of Glen, wondered where he was, how he was doing. It wasn't the first time. Wasn't even the twentieth. We wrote to each other for an incredible ten years, while Glen pulled up stakes and moved again, and again, and again, afflicted with terminal restlessness, an attempt to outrun his own pain. But in 1996, I finally lost the thread. I tried and tried. I even e-mailed his brother Gene, but got no answer. The trail was cold, and I had to surrender him to fate or the angels.

When I read his obituary, accompanied by a picture of Glen looking like a mere boy, sweet and shy, someone who just called out to be loved, I was barely out of my own thrashing battle, still trying to figure out what the hell happened to me, how the genie had exploded out of the bottle and derailed my life. But I kept thinking: Glen would know. He'd know just what to say to me, he'd know how to spread balm very gently on the raw wound of my mind. Like a sherpa, he'd been there before me, braved the elements and somehow survived it all.

Until now. When I read of the way he died, frozen to death like a street person (those souls he so identified with and wrote about with such compassion), with no one to hold him as the life ebbed out of him, I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all: at the medical community's complete inability to help such a large-hearted, lavishly gifted human being; at the gap between Glen and his loved ones (there was no doubt he loved them, but something always got in the way), at the grim, fearful, love-deprived boyhood that left scars on him, and in him, that would never be healed.

I did take out the folder, and looked at his dear, graceful handwriting, but haven't read the letters yet. I had thought of writing a piece about him, a sort of tribute, but I knew no one would really get it. When I think of him, which is often, tears well up, and I just want my funny, sardonic, gentle, wounded, wonderful brother back.

There is a song from the 70s by a group called Bread that I keep hearing in my mind. It has a haunting lyric that is like an impressionist painting of Glen's life:

"For a love that wouldn't bloom,
For the hearts that never played in tune.
Like a lovely melody that everyone can sing,
Take away the words that rhyme, it doesn't mean a thing."

The words seem to make a melody of themselves: I think I knew his name. I never knew him, but I loved him just the same. Wish that I had found the way, and the reasons that would make him stay.

But he couldn't stay; the pain was too great, the loneliness had hollowed him out, and the demons that screamed inside his skull had to be silenced once and for all. Such a person, making an intentional exit, is often described as "finally being at peace".

I think it goes beyond that. I think he is everywhere. I know he hangs around here, a warm spot in the room, a kind of disembodied smile, and I don't want him to go.

There is, of course, a postscript to this piece, first published in 2015. The article I wrote was published in 2006. I've been haunted by all that happened to Glen, and unable to shake it - even becoming angry  about it, and with him, as irrational as that sounds.

Glen was suffering from  more than "just" bipolar disorder, a malady I've lived with all my life. We cheered each other on during our (amazing) TEN-year correspondence, but I know he went through hard  times with addiction and was in  and out of hospital many times. After I lost touch with him, he went through worse ordeals, until he wrote a very graphic newspaper piece about having shock treatments, and the horrendous battles he had fought in the year or so before that.

I  do need to look  after myself now, as I don't even know if I'm going to survive. I am convinced cancer is going to get me, as it already "got" half my colon and may take the rest of it. I  am haunted, and wonder how to exorcize myself. He was a complicated man, and he DID run from things, but there was another side to him  that I loved. The extremes of mental illness he suffered (hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, voices jabbering in his head and over-the-top behaviour) scream schizophrenia, or at least schizo-affective disorder, which is really a combination of bipolar and schizophrenia. The incredible ordeals he suffered as a boy, including shock treatments at age 15 without the benefit of anaesthesia, seem to confirm this. So he was underdiagnosed, undertreated, and no doubt never on the right medication to truly help him. And on top of that, his sobriety could be shaky, complicated by his severe addiction to benzodiazepenes. 

So now what? I have never experienced a haunting like this, and I honestly don't know what to do  about it, as things are dark enough right now and my energy is at a premium. I threw away all his letters a couple of months ago, all the newspaper articles, all of it, and then longed to have it back. I was actually glad to find a few samples of it here. I was honestly trying to get my mind back. I know he would NOT have wanted to haunt me this way, no matter how haunting and horrible his death was.

Am I the only one who still remembers him? At this level, yes, it's likely. It was forty years ago we first connected through Morningside, thirty years ago since we corresponded, and twenty years ago since he committed suicide in the snow in Toronto, days before Christmas, always one of his hardest times. His children would be middle-aged, and most of his colleagues dead. Peter Gzowksi smoked and drank himself to death in 2002, age 60.

All those years - yet, since that fateful night in the ER when I learned I likely had cancer, this has haunted me and continues to. Where do I go from here? I no  longer have a church community or attend AA, and like Glen, most of my close friends have already died. I know how it feels to be abandoned. He ran from everything, but what choices did he have? 

I  have tried this and tried that, and now try to lean into it, which I know  doesn't  work either. But I have to try to dispel this black shadow which trails me like the long black veil of the old song. Of course I need to put my health first, including my mental health, and  at least try to  enjoy whatever time I have left.

This is the most recent of many posts I've done on Glen over the past 20  years, and as I said in my newspaper tribute, he lingers on, haunts me, and I don't know why. I can't give this a happy ending, but, like Glen, at least I can give it an honest report. He would have appreciated that.

Swarmed by Goslings! My day at Como Lake

 

This has never happened before! I stood in the middle of a colony of Canada geese, and the goslings, thinking I was going to feed them, stampeded towards me and then surrounded me. I was able to get closer to them than ever before, and after grazing in the grass, the parents shepherded them across the path to the lake, where they plopped into  the water. This was my best gosling video EVER!! 

Why I can't say the "w-word"

 

My daughter cliff-dives in Greece, and my granddaughter hang-glides in Brazil. . . so, you may ask, what sort of risks have I taken? Are you kidding? I WRITE, for God’s sake, and for 30 years or so I couldn’t even say I was “one of those” without inciting laughter or a derisive “yeah, right!”. It took me until age 50 to publish my first novel, and there were two more after that, and I am immensely proud of that accomplishment. But it’s still the same old story: “you’re a WHAT?” Just daring to say you’re a . . ., you know. . . a . . . (don’t say it, they’ll think you’re pretentious or lying) is, to me, an extreme sport. Here I strike various overdramatic poses, and by the way, I reviewed ALL the books on those shelves behind me! I know who I am, and of course the process of writing is its own reward - but it’s sort of sad that the rest of the world hasn’t caught up with me yet. I’m not holding my breath.