Ryan is 20 years old (but doesn't look a day over 20 months!)

 

 

Violin

 

Falling into amber,

a buzzing blur of

honey and blonde,

 

strings as veins, a coursing, rush of taut

bliss, stretched across a

hollow core

of yearning:    Heart-bulb

                           lush

will vibrate as  /  hips of wood

shine like patient still eyes

 

and ochre sounds tease, tug

at hunger, reach, reach.

Fingers and strings kiss and

come apart, kiss and come apart,

The frail box eems in a subtle

pullulation, shy as a girl, lush as a

wild                           and

   /      whiff of mink:/all in a stillness

the bow sighs, sighs like a deep

diver, soughing the life in

this creature of tree, this female

fleshed of the organs of nature –

 

and all nature, all in a murmur

of intimate pain,

                           hewn

draws from this/heart of nothing

(this wood-held dusk, this

stirred scent of stored petals

this great warm handful of love)

a shining:  a chiming, a brining,

a pool of dark wine

spilled from the lustre of flowing eyes,

a seeing, a speaking, this songswept

woman of wood.

 

- Margaret Gunning

Why the past isn't such a great place to live

 

How can I justify, or even describe, the things that won’t leave my head, even though I fervently wish they would?

And people. Don’t let’s get started – people who died more than twenty years ago? Why do they come into my head now? Is it because I  brushed scarily close  to death myself, just over a year ago, and realize my time may be shorter than I ever expected? 

Can I even go there?

How many deaths, how many realizations? Bohdan, my beloved violin teacher, showed a side of himself to me that I was reluctant to see, but recognized nonetheless. He was what we would nowadays call “inappropriate”. At the end of our lessons (many years ago when the awareness wasn't there yet), he always hugged me, but his hugs were enveloping, almost suffocating, and they went on forever. I honestly wondered if his wife was going to burst through the door (she owned the music store where he was a teacher) and discover us. He talked endlessly about “opening chakras”, but it got especially problematic when he went on and on about “genital chakras” and how women needed to masturbate more. Orgasms would cure anything! This verges on cult talk, reminding me of the Maharishi groping women before the Beatles blew the whistle on him.

But looking back at the last time I saw him, a year before his death, I realize now he had fallen pretty far and was living inside himself. His wife had died, though he refused to admit it (he said there was no death, which I'm having a hard time believing, these days). Grief had worn him down, and he seemed to have lost his purpose, his  joie de vivre. 

But there was more - I couldn't look  away from things that I used to  try to ignore. I saw someone who casually stepped on women's boundaries, and it made me uncomfortable. I was kind of ashamed to admit to myself that he creeped me out, and I did not want to meet with him again. No  doubt I was able to cut him more slack all those years ago. But you can’t turn back insight – it’s yours forever, and it changes you on a molecular level.

Who else am I finally recognizing as "inappropriate"?  Do I HAVE to go into Gabor Mate again? I don’t, but for  some weird reason he won’t leave my head. I don’t even like the man, find him cold and dismissive, but it’s just possible that way back in 2005 (yes! THAT long ago), we “had” something, some sort of connection that mattered. A lot of it was through music. But didn’t  that end a long  time ago, decades? And what about the betrayal: not only stealing some of my ideas and repeating them uncredited in one of his books, but describing me in the same book (seriously, after our so-called friendship in which I shared a lot of sensitive stuff), as “a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism. who still attends AA meetings after 15 years.”  Obviously  describing an emotional cripple in the iron lung of a 12-step program. So much for mutual admiration. He not only pitied me, but shoved me into a category in which he felt comfortably distant (diagnosing and treating addicts on the notorious downtown eastside, even having affairs with several of them - yes, he did that, and got away with it).

 Jesus.

Then there is poor Glen, and why can’t I keep him buried? The way he died was so macabre and shocking that I can’t compare it to anything or anyone else. I understand his exit, I see why he couldn’t go on, he had careened in the extremes of bipolar illness for 65 years and was sucked dry. There was a police report filed after he escaped from  the psychiatric ward, took a bottle of pills and washed it down with beer, then waited to pass out and freeze to death beside the railroad tracks. The police report described him as 6’2’ and 150 pounds. Glen had always been a big guy, stocky and round-faced, but in the most recent photo of him he  looked like  someone's ghost, not even his own, with an eerie smile  and glazed eyes, and a front  tooth knocked out. 

No one should have to  die like this, but macabre as it was, there was a dark poetry in it. Glen had struggled so hard and had so  many suicide attempts that he had spent time in a coma and had brain damage, then had a stroke. His gift with words was diminishing, and that may have been the final straw.

But TWENTY years ago – what is this? I try to live in the now, I try to savor the moment, and most days I  manage at least a semblance of it. But meantime, there is all this other  stuff rattling around. Insanely, I have thought of contacting Gabor – I even tried to before that disastrous Prince Harry debacle, but if he ever saw it he never responded. Is it something to do with what was going on with me 20 years ago?

It was, mostly, horrible, but eventually did lead to a huge  change of direction, a massive shift, and more happiness than I had ever thought possible  through the birth of my grandchildren – one born a year for four years. I was in Grandma heaven, and young enough – only 50 – to get down on the floor with them, make glorious messes, take part in hilarious chasing games. I got to be a child  again, only I did it right this time. I was the happy child I never got to be.

Now they’re all grown up, and I’m left at another crossroads. So what does my brain do? Go backwards? Maybe that’s it - . I don't  seem to have a forwards right now, so I just live in the day. Not a bad deal, but how long can it go on? I wonder if there is another epiphany left in me. The things that fed me for so  long are becoming  frustrating and inadequate. What’s next?

My Gabor-rant: when Dr. Mate stole my stuff

I found this letter (written in 2008) deep in the files, and I doubt that I ever sent it to Gabor, but I needed to write it  at the time, and I do think there are some good insights in it. But it's a cautionary tale about guru-ism in general, and the fundamental dishonesty of these lofty figures in particular. I don't remember the specific quote he stole from me, but it's the theft that counts. And his disrespect of those people who are trying to recover frankly revolted me in someone who is supposed to be an addictions specialist (read: guru) and is often described as "world-famous". No thanks, Gabor - I'd rather be happy. 

Though you have made a joke out of stealing my “white gloves” phrase, it has turned out to be quite pivotal (has it not?) in differentiating your addictive behaviour from that of your patients. Seeing it in an unfinished manuscript was one thing, but seeing it in print in your book (i.e., on public display) gave me the unpleasant feeling that I had been ripped off.

This wasn’t just a couple of neutral words but a metaphor, and worlds have turned on metaphor. It gave me the feeling you thought you could harvest my remarks and incorporate them, that it was all fair game. If you were going to use it, you should have asked me directly or at least quoted me anonymously, and not taken credit for it yourself.  No writer should steal from another writer, ever, nor make light of it anywhere, especially not in such a public venue as the media.

 Hearing you talk about it on CBC didn’t fix the problem, nor did it make me any less uncomfortable as you announced, “this is who I shamelessly stole it from” (then giving my real name).  It’s as if you think it’s OK, as long as you’re contrite about it on national radio. But CBC isn’t the place for this sort of  admission.

 You could have avoided all this unpleasantness if you had written or phoned me and said, “Margaret, I’m sorry I ripped off your line” (that is, if you really were sorry).  The bizarre public way you went about it (which could be interpreted as “look who I made a fool of”, or as a public demonstration of your conscience) makes me wonder if you have any sense of boundaries, or any respect for me at all. 

 In the AA chapter of your book (and it also offended me, a 12-step veteran, that you felt entitled to paraphrase and interpret the 12 steps after only one meeting), you offered a description of me. At least, I think it was me, through some sort of distorting lens: “A manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism, she’s been attending for fifteen years.”

 Nowhere in this rather depressing description do I see the words “sober” or “recovering”. In seventeen years, I have never had a relapse. I drank for twenty years, so my recovery will soon catch up: as of now, I have been sober nearly 1/3 of my life.  Yes, I do have a long history, but of what? Can you guess?

 But you wouldn’t know that from your description of me. You can “attend” meetings for decades and not experience a day of sobriety, but from the beginning I have worked extremely hard, both to maintain my sobriety and to understand and change the self-defeating thinking and behaviour that triggered my drinking. I don’t think I would have stayed sober this long if it hadn’t worked.

 But that’s not what it says in your book.

 Since the general public doesn’t have a clue about AA, they tend to think it’s attended only by practicing alcoholics (perhaps even the skid row type – believe me, I’ve heard a lot of comments) who are too weak to do it on their own.  If by some chance they do succeed, they are “former alcoholics”, as if the addiction has been “conquered” or overcome by sheer force of will.  Then they stop attending, because they are “cured”.

 Until I joined, I think I felt something like that myself.  Fifteen years of “attending” may look admirable to an AA member, but a civilian might think,  “She has attended meetings for fifteen years, and she’s still an alcoholic?”  If you look at your description carefully, it’s possible to conclude that I’ve been drinking for all that time, which is, to say the least, inaccurate.

 But there is so much more to it than that: attending meetings is just the surface level of a very deep process of revelation and profound personal change. The fourth and fifth steps take the recovering person to a new level of self-knowledge which is necessary for awareness of triggers, not just of drinking but of the behavioural “isms” that go with it. AA step meetings, usually held in a member’s home, go far deeper than open meetings in this sort of exploration, and can create profound bonds of connection and friendship that can last for years.

 And then there are the AA roundups (conferences with speakers from all over the world) and the retreats, such as the yearly Westminster Abbey retreat in Mission which I have “attended” (opened my soul to) for ten years.  These are intensive spiritual gatherings for those who are ready to do some serious work with an open heart. I cannot begin to describe the epiphanies I have experienced there.

 Did you know about all this stuff (or any of it) when you wrote about AA? At very least, I think attending more than one meeting was necessary and would have demonstrated a modicum of respect.  NO ONE, not even someone as brilliant as you seem to think you are, “gets” AA or any other soul-changing recovery group after only one meeting. I hated my first meeting, in fact I was completely closed until about my twelfth meeting. And not all meetings are created equal.  The mix is different wherever you go.  Too bad you aren’t an alcoholic, as there is a Doctors in AA group which is apparently very powerful, and no doubt better dressed.

 In other words, I think this was a pretty shallow and even disrespectful take on a profound process, but most people likely won’t realize it because they have nothing to compare it to. They will assume AA is just a bunch of lower-middle-class people getting together to slap each other on the back, smoke too much and hear someone say amusing things about the hell they went through.  You say you like these people, that you wish you were one of them, but I think you clearly differentiate yourself from them, as you quietly withdraw into your study to listen to classical CDs. Of all the addictions I’ve ever heard of, this one is pretty genteel, and about as far from the street as you can get. (White gloves, indeed.)

 The other issue (a big one) is this:  must I be identified by my psychiatric condition?  Don’t you think I am (much) more than “a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism”? Would you say, “a Parkinsonian with a long history of playing too much bingo. . .”, or “an ADD (note, he’s no longer a person but a disease) with a long history of buying too many CDs” (or, for a more exact comparison, “a schizophrenic with a long history of heroin addiction”? How would this person be perceived by the ignorant public? Would they assume he was clean; would they assume he was well?)

 I don’t give a shit how I am perceived, as I tossed that kind of judgement in the wastebasket a long time ago. But that’s not the point. It hurts me that my fellow sufferers (who often can’t defend themselves) must be cruelly misjudged and damaged by ignorance, insensitivity and stigma.  It galls me that mental illness is still such a defining trait. Just the term is problematic for me. We don’t say “diabetic illness” or “arthritic illness,” do we? And if you’re “ill”, as in “mentally ill”, how can you be well? Defeat is built right into the terminology. 

 And don’t get me started on being identified as “a manic-depressive” (or more accurately, “a bipolar”: don’t you realize the term was changed over 15 years ago?), instead of a person with a bipolar condition. Even “a manic-depressive woman” is a shade better, as it’s at least  a descriptive term, not an identity badge.  AIDS activists broke ground on this many years ago: and even at that, AIDS was labelled a “syndrome” rather than a “disorder”, a less stigmatizing term.  

 There are people (maybe you?) who would say this is just so much hairsplitting, quibbling over terminology that means the same thing. It is not. We don’t have accurate terms to describe the raging forest fire that rips through people’s brains, leaving blackened ruins. We don’t have the language to describe the nausea at having to tolerate other people’s ignorance, pity and disgust. Or the powerlessness and sense of being marginalized, shunted to the fringes of society.  We don’t have terms for the courage it takes (yes, the courage it takes!) to get up on your feet again, and start to take a few shaky, tentative steps.

 Years ago I used to say, “if you had to live inside my head for one day, you’d run screaming.” That may be true, but we can’t get inside each other’s heads. However, we can practice some empathy, choose our words with care instead of falling back on medical jargon, and be aware that a person’s individuality and humanity always comes ahead of their disease condition. 

 Most medical practitioners don’t know this difference, but what about you?  Your book is flying off the shelves due to your insight, compassion and medical knowledge (so they say).  But a great many people, not knowing anything about addiction, will believe pretty much everything that is in it. Yet you describe your “friend” (me) as a sort of case study, a chronically disabled person who drags the long chains of alcoholism behind her, still attached to meetings like a life support system after fifteen years.

 In the past few years I have learned so much I can’t even begin to paraphrase it here, but one thing I know for sure is that people like me must insist on dignity and stand up to prejudice and misinformation wherever we find it. This isn’t just for me, but for the countless others who are too powerless to do it. How we express ideas around addiction and mental illness matters because it affects people’s (especially readers’) thinking and behaviour towards sufferers. Whether it’s a metaphor or a description of a human being, every word counts, because it directly affects the self-esteem and thus the emotional and mental health of every person who has walked through the hell of addiction.

 To sum up, I believe your little jokes about stealing my phrase (a pivotal one that has been quoted several times by journalists) miss the mark. Are you admitting that you did wrong, or placating me so I won’t call you on it? Assuming you could incorporate my original metaphor was both arrogant and dishonest. Your little drama of confessing it on the air rather than apologizing to me was extremely rude, not to mention twisted. In addition, your inaccurate description of me painted me as a sad case, a mentally ill alcoholic who still needs propping up after 15 years.  Calling this disrespectful is an understatement.

 And how is this for a rewrite:

 “A woman I know, sober seventeen years and a faithful member of the program, has been able to ride out the violent rollercoaster of a bipolar condition that could have ended her sobriety and her life.  It didn’t, due to the power and grace she still finds in her regular AA meetings. It is more than fellowship: it’s powerful medicine.”

 For the sake of accuracy, I ask you to revise your description of me in subsequent printings.

 Margaret

 (Needless to say, that didn't happen. Since then, criticism of Mate's unsavory connections with various political factions have done damage to his reputation, which wasn't so hot to begin with.)

 

Guru of Gloom and Doom: Amazon Reviews of Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal

My counselor suggested this book after hearing many reviews about it, and 1/3 of the way through or so, I had to put it down. It was very hard to read. You need to have a very extensive vocabulary to even begin to understand a lot of what he is saying, and I am an avid reader with a large vocabulary, and I was still having to constantly look up words or be left guessing if I had the right idea on something or not. It's also written in a way that you can't read in a nice flow. I had to keep rereading sentences because he worded things in such odd ways, in ways people never speak, as if he was purposefully trying to be impossible to understand to show how lofty and wise he is compared to his fellow humans. It was very braggy and cocky in feel. 

In the first 1/3 of the book, it was only doom and gloom. You've had trauma in your life, you are doomed to bad health, disease after disease, a shorter life span, etc, etc, etc. There was no hope of anything in the book up to this point. I tried to go further, but the writing was just so heavy, it was definitely doing the opposite of what my counselor hoped I would get out of the book. I would suggest you have a doctorate level vocabulary, and a huge understanding of psychology before reading this, because even with higher education and a vocabulary that surprises my friends, this book was way above me. This book should have been written for the every day man, with the author having compassion for those he was trying to reach, or promoted for more professional people.

My psychologist recommended this book to her patients. I am on a journey to heal childhood trauma and wanted to add this to my library. I couldn't get into it. I feel like he is trying to jam so much into this book that it didn't cover what I hoped it would. Granted, I didn't get far before I gave up. I just wasn't able to really follow his points and maybe that is because I kept trying to relate it to trauma and couldn't.

Just a bunch of statistics mainly. Yes we are all different so what’s normal for me is normal for me not anyone else. Waste of money.

I find Mate to be overrated. He's a black and white thinker who offers the idea that all addiction stems from a single cause without supplying any serious evidence for his dismissal of genetics and the like. Further, I'm not buying that his son was the co-author. I believe Daniel Mate did all the heavy work here, a mouthpiece for his father's radical views.

It took me nearly a year to finish. I had high hopes based on the reviews, but for me, it felt overhyped.

Geared towards women which I wish I'd have known ahead of time. Switched to skimming 20 pages in. There's little to be gleaned from thus book. Significant effort is required to navigate the authors not so subtle political opinions. Pass on this.

Extremly disappointed. Its so evident that he and his son picked a political side for a country they do not even reside in, and decided to make a certain party and politicians responsible for the mental decline of society, simply disgusting! I once highly respected this man and his research, but he lost me on this one.

Of course we have the usual victim narrative regarding women and minorities etc. As the author quotes from a famous movie, "It's not your fault! It's not your fault!" but he fails to recognise that very often it is our fault because we are nearly always the very authors of our own miseries.

Imagine this:  You take your car into the shop, and the mechanic, reputed to be a mechanical genius, tells you all about your car, how it works, and how it can stop working correctly. Turns out how the car was made is important. Influences and so forth. You nod to show interest. You're assured this guy knows his business. "My car had a rough childhood," you tell him, and he nods sagely.

But then this mechanic starts in about "globalization," "late-stage capitalism," and you start to look at your watch, thinking this was a mistake. "Yeah, both those parties are two legs in the same pair of pants. Corporations run America." Then he points to a leak coming from the undercarriage. "Got some nasty inflammation there, mate. You been driving some stressful roads lately?" He looks at you accusingly.

"Look," you tell him, "I just wanted you to fix my car..."
He's furious.
"Fix. Your. Car. Are you serious? In this world? Ha! Nothing can be fixed, the whole system is broken..."
As he breaks down sobbing, you quietly leave the repair shop. Luckily, all you lost was a few bucks for a book. Phew.

He brings in debunked social justice nonsense about minority stress as well as promoting drug trips from “enlightened” indigenous cultures who still have a lifespan decades shorter than western ones without grasping the irony of this, while performing a work out self flagellation.

His book made no sense at all it was very jumbled and I gained nothing from it , he was writing a lot about stuff we all know about when it comes to trauma, cancer stuff and childhood traumas , never mentioned happy families that still got cancer , the book is mostly gloom and doom , good luck reading it .

Way too many quote from celebrities. And I don’t think he gets close to explaining the title. I think the book will tell people a lot of what they want to hear (capitalism is “bad”, indigenous people have indigenous wisdom etc. etc.) But I struggle to see the book as more than a few Ted talks strung together.

I didn't finish the book as it just came across as a whingefest. The author just seemed to drone on about how everything has turned to manure.

Gabor Mate: Guru of Gloom and Doom meets Hapless Harry

 

'Trauma expert' Gabor Mate says he bitterly REGRETS controversial Prince Harry interview because of 'demeaning, dismissive' backlash he faced - saying 'foofoo' surrounding it took over his life and made him 'lose himself'

• Harry's conversation with the doctor, 79, was fiercely scrutinized back in March
• At the time, it was revealed Gabor had previously made anti-Zionist comments
• He has now addressed the backlash, admitting that it left him in a 'dark place'

'Trauma expert' Gabor Maté has admitted that he regrets his controversial interview with Prince Harry because the 'foofoo' surrounding it took over his entire life and made him 'lose himself.'

Back in March, the Duke of Sussex, 39, spoke with the the Hungarian-Canadian doctor, 79, about 'living with loss and the importance of personal healing,' while promoting his memoir Spare.

During their sit-down, which was live-streamed on the web and cost $33 to watch, Harry made a series of bombshell claims about growing up as a royal.

The conversation was fiercely scrutinized, especially after it was brought to light that Gabor had made a series of eyebrow-raising comments in the past - like comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, defending Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians, and branding Israel's government as terrorists.

He is also an outspoken supporter of decriminalizing drugs, and has used the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat patients suffering from mental illness. 

Now, the author and physician has addressed the public's 'demeaning, dismissive, and distorted' reaction to his chat with Harry, while revealing that it left him in a really 'dark place.'

'There was an incredible social media reaction to it, which was, for the most part, so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted,' he said during a recent appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast.

'I barely even know how to talk about it. I thought by this age I would know better, but you know what, it really got to me.'

Gabor said the backlash left him in a 'really negative state of mind' and feeling like he 'lost himself' - leading to him eventually reaching out to a psychiatrist for help.

'I was in a dark place, I'm a human being like the rest,' he continued. 'It's so difficult to ask for help but I did.'

He accused the media of twisting his words and recalled them calling him things like 'stern, overbearing, and a merchant of pain.'

After speaking to a psychiatrist, however, Gabor said he later realized that his problems didn't have to do with the criticism, but rather, stemmed from an 'old unresolved wound' from his past. 

According to Gabor, he had reservations about talking to Harry from the start, since he was uncomfortable with the idea of making people pay to watch it.

Gabor said the backlash put him a 'really negative state of mind' and resulted in him feeling like he 'lost himself' during an appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast

The conversation was live-streamed on the web and tickets were priced at $33. People who watched it received a copy of Harry's book, Spare

'I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree the way they set it up. Because the way it was set up, to watch it, people had to buy a copy of Harry's book,' he explained. 

'I thought, "This is not fair, four million people have already bought the book. Why can't they watch this interview?" They had to buy another copy. 

'I believed this should be a free public service from two people who are having a very interesting conversation. 

'But out of sheer opportunism I agreed to it. I didn't follow my gut feeling. I agreed to something that I didn't really like. 

'Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him, I didn't like the idea of putting myself behind a pay wall. I lost myself just in agreeing to do it.'

Despite his regrets about the interview, Gabor insisted that he 'doesn't care' what the public thinks of him anymore.

But he said he wants people to 'see him' for who he is and 'not some distorted version.'

'I don't care if people agree with me or if they refute my ideas, but I want them to see me and what I'm actually saying, not some distorted version created by their own minds,' he concluded. 

'So what if someone says [something bad about me]. I don't live in the press. I don't live in someone else's mind. Here I am. Let them think and say what they want.'

Gabor said that after the interview, he had to reach out to a psychiatrist for help, adding, 'I was in a dark place, I'm a human being like the rest.' Harry is seen during their chat

Gabor has more than two decades of experience working with people suffering from addiction and mental illness - and he fiercely believes that all of the problems we face as adults stem from trauma we endured as children. 

Gabor has been scrutinized for comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, defending Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians, and branding Israel's government as terrorists

He himself had a traumatic upbringing. He was born in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, and when he was five months old his maternal grandparents were among the Jews murdered in Auschwitz. He was then taken from his mother and hidden with an aunt until the war ended. 

He is an outspoken supporter of decriminalizing drugs, and has used the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat patients suffering from mental illness. 

The psychedelic plant, which is taken as a brewed drink, causes people to experience hallucinations and other side effects, including vomiting - something Prince Harry has admitted to using to manage his 'trauma and pain.'

It remains illegal in the US, UK, and Canada, and in 2011, Canadian officials threatened to arrest Dr Maté if he didn't stop using the drug to treat his patients. 

On top of his shocking anti-Zionist comments, Gabor has also contributed to a pro-Kremlin website that defends brutal regimes around the world and has spoken warmly of the spittle-flecked Pink Floyd star and alleged 'Putin apologist' Roger Waters.

OK THEN! Time for the blogger to intervene.

I have too much to say about Gabor Mate (and won't write a nasty poem about him, though I think I did once). I did meet the man back in 2003, interviewing him for January Magazine, an online publication which never paid me one red cent for all my hard work. He had just written his second book, When the Body Says No, which is one of those titles that sounds like a lot, but means very little. 

I think I was taken in by his guru-hood even then, though at the time he was still an actual doctor, a family practitioner working on the  cruel streets of Vancouver. He even gave me a tour of his downtown office, and showed me around the sights, i. e. the various addicts standing around in their different states of dereliction. He seemed hyper, severe, with an unreadable face that I was soon to learn only had one expression.

He's likely the only person I ever met who doesn't smile. I mean, he doesn't. In the rare "smiling" photos, it's more like a wince, with alarmingly dead eyes. He never laughs - I mean, he does not laugh. He was full of bombast during our coffee talks, but had no real warmth, no sense of the joy of living. In fact, I consider him one of the most joyless human beings I've ever met. And he cannot survive if he is not playing the role of the perpetual saviour.

Unfortunately, this has worked all too well for him, and his fans are cultish in their devotion. One even described him as "like having Jesus back here on earth". When you look at his detestable pro-Hamas views, his baffling and even frightening alliance with Russia, you've got to wonder how Jesus could have gotten so fucked up.

At any rate, though there's more, I am weary of the subject already and don't want to waste another brain cell on him. For all his Messianic posturing, the guy is about as resilient as an ice cube on a hot summer's day. There's no "there" there, no real substance, and no real joy.

The doctor has been unmasked, and he cannot stand it. In one breath he says people's comments nearly destroyed him, then immediately says he does not care two figs about what anyone says. Hypocrisy, much? Or is his memory so faulty he doesn't remember what he said just a minute ago? 

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. The recent photos of Mate bring to mind that statement, "You deserve your face at fifty." Add thirty years, and the photos tell the tale.  

A couple of things caused me to revisit this post from three years ago. I was ALL DONE with the whole Meghan and Harry debacle, until the formerly-known-as-Prince CREEP Andrew was hauled off to a prison cell for questioning about his scummy activities with Jeffrey Epstein. Somehow or other this dragged me back into the whole royal mess, including the H&M debacle, which has only escalated in recent times to the point of utter absurdity.

Just the other day I got a comment from someone who just discovered my original 2023 post on Mate's interview with Harry, likely due to all the royal kerfuffle going on right now. She agreed with me that the guy is disturbingly creepy, and so lofty he actually says things like "I'm human too", kind of like Meghan Markle saying, "I, too, get to make mistakes!" Do tell. I never realized. Whatever I objected to back then has only gotten worse, as he sets out the bait of his traumatized childhood (PLEASE not again!) and thousands still take the bait. 

I rediscovered a piece I wrote during the Prince Harry kerfuffle, when I felt the need to share some of my own past with this dried-up old bastard. I think it's well-written and has something to say, so I'll repeat it here. 

I knew Gabor Mate personally when he began to write bestsellers on ADHD, addiction, trauma, etc. I contributed to his book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, but was never given credit for it. In fact, in the book he described me as "a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism" - just the way I want to be remembered! I don' t know why I let that go by, but I can no longer make excuses for him. It was a shameful way to describe any human being, let alone one you pretended to care about, then  ripped off and used.

The Gabor I knew when I first met him in 2003 no longer exists, and he drank his own Koolaid a long time ago and has become a particularly toxic kind of guru. It's not just the ayahuasca retreats he holds every year in South America (do a YouTube search under Gabor Mate ayahuasca, and see what come up). He believes EVERY single problem you have in life stems from childhood trauma.

But there are far worse things. The Daily Mail ran a slew of articles about him, which no one seems to have read - seven or eight at last count. I knew his political beliefs were extreme, but I had no idea he supports the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas (he says they are his heroes) and accuses Israel of horrible crimes such as ethnic cleansing. He has publicly defended two celebrities who made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks.

Odd that a Jew would do this, but being Jewish gives him some sort of immunity to criticism. If a non-Jew said all this, he'd be publicly shamed and lose all credibility. He also hauls out that trauma story of the Holocaust/being separated from his mother at EVERY event, every book, every interview, article, etc. It never fails to bring people on-side, but it's like MM's dish soap story – it works, because how can you NOT sympathize with a newborn baby being abandoned in Nazi Germany? But it's a cheap trick in my estimation, and cheapens the stories of other survivors.

To me, this is exactly like Harry constantly talking about "Mummy", monetizing her at every turn, and thinking it's basically her fault for "leaving" him. But Gabor Mate's well-documented anti-Israel beliefs caused a prominent rabbi in the US to speak out against Mate and actually tried to get the event cancelled. (Why isn't anyone talking about this? I have not seen ONE mention of it apart from the intensive coverage in the Daily Mail.) It's not a good look for H the Taliban-killer to publicly align himself with someone who is a known terrorist sympathizer, particularly with that little event that's coming up in May.

There's a lot more, as in the fact he told me he had an affair with one of his addict patients, and when that one ended in disaster, he started another one, nearly destroying his marriage. He publicly recommends (in his books) the Landmark seminars which have been compared to Scientology. And on and on it goes - this is just scratching the surface. The most ludicrous thing is that he claims to be an addict himself, so that he understands all the pain addicts go through, because he buys too many classical music CDs. I know this is unbelievable, but it’s right there in his book.

He is has become one of these guru types who tramples on boundaries, because he can. As far as I am concerned, he is a dangerous predator. There's a lot more, but I will say I think he lost his way a long time ago and just played into Harry's hands, basically echoing everything he believes and not challenging him at all. It seems to me no one has really done a deep dive on Mate, who has a devoted fan base of mostly women who want to mother him. If you google him, it’s all positive, but if you even skim the headlines on the Daily Mail website over the past few days, there are a dozen or so articles about this whole mess. Everything they are saying about him checks out. As with so many things, no one is looking deeply enough into his phony credentials, and many people still fairly worship him for the work he did with addicts 20+ years ago.

Might it be possible that when he says he "lost himself", there really wasn't much left to lose?

Rosamunde by Schubert

 

Shosty's Waltz!

 

Bill Prouten on Sax 2!

 

Bill Prouten on Sax!

 

The Waltzing Cat by Leroy Anderson!

 

Meowy Cats SING!

 

Space Cats — Magic Fly

OK  THEN! If anyone is still reading this blog, you'd notice I'm mostly posting clips from YouTube. There's a reason for this! I can't play the damn things on YouTube. I want to film them off my monitor, then try to pass them off as my own content (sorry, that's what I do!). It's fun for me to tinker around, fingerpaint, as I like to call it - my tech vocabulary is VERY limited, but I do what I can. This is one of the first videos that truly entranced me. Can't do a clip of it, either! But it's fun. Share the joy!

P. S. Most of the "traffic" on my blog now consists of thinly-veiled ads for this or that. Most are in foreign languages. I know this isn't a good sign! Does this mean I've been "hacked"? With all the tomfoolery YouTube dishes out every day, I wouldn't be surprised. But what do they want from me? I'm only here to have fun. Fun hasn't done all that well on the internet in the past few years. But I'm trying my best! You can curse the darkness, or light all the candles on the birthday cake.

NBC Peacock Logo (this scared the hell out of me as a kid!)

 

Underdog!

 

The! Ice! Is! Gonna! Break! Christopher Walken's Finest Moment

 

Peacock Display!

 

William Shatner: It's a weird world. AND I LOVE IT!💗💗💗

 

Crunchy Cat Luna: CRUNCH THAT KIBBLE!!

 

It's SUNDAY, SUNDAY (Much better than FRIDAY!)

 

Songs of the Pogo: Plinky, plunkety plank!

 

The PATHE ROOSTER: Best Film Logo EVER!

 

This is the 20th time I've tried to post this clip! I seemed to have forgotten how, then I remembered, then I deleted it. Now this SEEMS to be the clip! We'll see. It's my favorite film logo, the Pathe Rooster. You can have your Leo the Lion! I do wonder if there was a hint of satire at work here. Anyway, this is my first post of 2026, and I hope it won't be the last. Happy New Year! 

The Adventures of Superman (1959): 💥SUPERMAN to the RESCUE!💥

PSSHHHHHHT! Superman comes in for a landing. This show was so primitive that it's laughable now, but we ate it up. George Reeves didn't really have the build for it, and he didn't look so good in tights, but it didn't seem to matter. And we won't get into the murky circumstances of his death. (The myth is that he committed suicide by jumping off a building, proving he really COULDN'T fly in real life.) 

My brother Arthur used to lie across the back of the sofa and make "pssshhhhh" sounds. I was actually pretty scared of that intense, dramatic opening: "It's a bird!" "It's a plane!", and it really was pretty creepy to see Reeves standing there suspended in the middle of space while everyone exclaimed about it, and an American flag flapped in the background. ("Truth! Justice! And the American Way!" I won't get into the irony of THAT statement.) 

Fun fact: the announcer doing the famous "yes, it's Superman" voiceover was  Bill Kennedy, a radio host who later did a TV movie show called Bill Kennedy Showtime which I watched on Detroit TV. He often reminisced about various movies in which he played bit parts, as well as his radio career. 

Love, Health and Loss (. . . and Beethoven!)

Alrighty then, I wasn't going to either make this video or post it, but my return to Beethoven (and music in general), no doubt due to the death of Bohdan and other profound losses, I found myself just talking to the camera. Who else is there? There is no one I can be completely honest with. 

It's I guess bizarre to resort to this, but how can it hurt me? I hear such horror stories about the internet every day, and of course YouTube has harassed, censored and tried everything to rip down my harmless, supposedly fun and lighthearted hobby channel over the past 12 years or so. They take down things that are utterly harmless, issue dire warnings about comments I have made that are "bullying", "abusive" "harassing" and "threatening" towards public figures I will never meet (and how can I hurt them? They are public figures, and so long as I am civil, which I am for the most part. they are putting themselves under scrutiny. And I see videos which rip into these same people with every profanity you  can imagine, and they are allowed to stand.)

They tell me over and over again  that I have "violated community standards" - most recently, for a video I made when I found a large wild mushroom in my yard and did a closer look at it - with NO references whatsoever to ANYTHING to do with ANY drug! It was just  a mushroom and I found it interesting. Any child  could have watched it. But no. YouTube told me that I was, literally, using my channel to sell drugs. I contested it, and they said that after "careful review", my video did indeed violate all of YouTube's standards of decency and would soon be terminated if I didn't stop doing things like that.  Selling drugs. On my channel.  There were not even any joking references to "magic mushrooms"  or anything of the sort.

So why do I continue?

I guess I have to ask myself. I watched this video several times, then decided I WILL post it, as it's not excessively gloomy and it really does share my deepest thoughts and revelations right now. Whether it's hopeful or not, well, hope may be too much to ask for in this darkening world. 

I even posted it on Facebook, which is an exercise in utter futility, and NO ONE actually watches it. Not one. I can't even get into how this dynamic has played out for my entire life. If I get into that, I truly won't wake up in the morning.

So I want to keep  waking up, make no mistake, but I feel I am dodging depression the way I had to dodge cancer (this time).

So what will the next year bring? Another year. 

We'll see. I hope.

So did I take my health for granted? (The short answer: YES.)

OK then, I guess I break my own rules sometimes, regarding oversharing and droning on and on about health matters. (I won't say "issues"!). But sometimes I can't help myself. I even posted this on Facebook, knowing no one will even glance at it. Not sure why. But I do. . . 

The only time I feel happily absorbed is when I am actually creating content for the channel, the blog, etc. Posting it seems like an exercise in futility a lot of the time. Is this behind the virtual collapse of my bodily health? Could it be,  I finally had enough frustration, enough abandonment, enough being ignored even if it's my finest work?

Or am I just a little lonely?

I had my religion, such as it was, for decades, and AA, which was kind of the same thing in its clunky, primitive way. No thinking allowed. But I do think about drinking, haven't done it yet, but I do use THC oil as judiciously as I can to manage pain (NOT relieve it - that's too much to ask for). I also do it for the mental break, if I even get one. 

Some part of me says: OK then, didn't you get the memo? No one cares about what you have to share, they never did, it always fell flat no matter how hard you tried. Or did I try too hard? Someone will cut in about now and claim I didn't try hard enough.

The gaiety of grief

 

No less a legend than Dylan Thomas once wrote that "there is no gaiety so gay as the gaiety of grief." When I learned that a man I loved very much had committed suicide, I had to do something, so I made a collage out of old Christmas cards. Not only was it NOT sad, it was full of hope and beauty. I have no idea how I found those things in myself at this worst of all possible times. But I'd like to share it here. 

Lonely Hearts and Fractured Minds

I recently deleted a couple of blog entries that were just too depressing (read: too real). I badly needed a distraction, so I decided to watch one of the many movies I've recorded and just stockpiled. Hey, what about this one? I thought. I know it's good, so there will be no surprises.

So I ended up watching (for the tenth time) Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas. I knew the movie was brilliant, but I didn't expect it to "take me down" (as John Lennon said in Strawberry Fields). Douglas was too good in the role, looking and acting so much like Van Gogh that it was scary, and taking us down and down and down until we spiralled and sank along with him. 

Enlivening this harrowing scenario was Anthony Quinn, who won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Paul Gauguin. Believe me, I know Paul Gauguin, maybe better than I ever wanted to know him, from reading multiple biographies. He's the stockbroker who ran away from his wife and children (and a life of respectability) to sleep with 13-year-old maidens in Tahiti, before dying of syphilis in his 40s. Along the way, he casually tipped over the known art world and smiled as he watched it fracture, splinter and sink.

Ferocious as Douglas is in his painfully accurate portrayal of Vincent, Quinn just walks off with it, tall and fierce and ruthless ("I like my women fat, vicious and not too bright!"). Two powerhouse actors like these should have cancelled each other out, but they don't. There's a moment when they are arguing (like they do most of the time), and they are tete a tete - face to face so that their profiles almost touch, and it's so perfect. There's respect for each other in this nearly-comic pose, to the point where they can each let the other be their wild, sometimes irrationally crazy selves.

And this photo, taken during a break in the shooting, emphasizes the way they keep out of each other's way, and the respect inherent in recognizing brilliance in each other. Two legendary actors at the very top of their game. (And Kirk Douglas had a profile to die for!) 

But hard on the heels of this exhausting spellbinder, I made another mistake. I opened the Glen Book, which is a binder full of correspondence I kept up with Glen Allen, a Canadian journalist who eventually committed suicide after 65 grinding years of alcoholism and bipolar disorder.

Familiar ground for me, as I've suffered from, and with, both of those conditions, and it's easy to feel cursed by such a thing, when others literally have no idea. This is why Glen and I connected so closely. I never even met the man, in fact it all started with a fan letter I wrote to him for his deeply-moving account of struggling with addiction in The Morningside Papers. But he actually answered me, in his uniquely graceful and melancholy style. And the exchange of letters continued for almost ten years, until I lost touch with him around 2000.

Then at the end of  2005, I opened the Globe and Mail to find a book review I had written for them, and - .

There he was, his picture, with his obituary, describing the tragic  circumstances of his death. He had been hospitalized yet again for depression (and he had undergone ECT numerous times, though with ever-diminishing benefits), and this time he couldn't take it any more. He overdosed on pills, then wandered off, and he was found frozen to death the next day beside some railroad tracks.

This, combined with Kirk Douglas hacking off his ear and shooting himself in the heart, did not help my already-sinking mood, and I wished I had left Glen and his travails in the past where they belonged. He killed himself almost exactly twenty years ago, when I was in the most fragile state I had ever been in (to date - let's not try to look ahead too much). I don't know how I made it through that time, and I didn't have Glen to write to then, but he was suffering in  a way I could barely imagine. He had already tried to kill himself by overdosing and passing out on shore (this was Saint John, New Brunswick, where my kids were born), and waiting for  the tide carry him out. It didn't work, but there was brain  damage, followed by a stroke. Even his brilliant ability to write, to keep a record, began to falter, the worst fate for someone whose writing kept him alive when nothing else worked.

Worst of all was the photo. I had several pictures of Glen when he was doing well, and he was almost handsome in a soft-faced way, like a middle-aged boy. He looked sensitive and sweet, and vulnerable. But in this last photo, which was part of a police report after he had gone missing from the hospital, he did not look like any version of him I had ever seen.

He was listed as being 6' 2" and 150  pounds. Earlier photos showed a man who was quite stocky, probably well over 200 pounds, and here was this wraith, this unnaturally starved-looking man with uncanny eyes, just like two headlamps glistening in a way I recognized from my own bouts of mania. His front tooth had broken off, which added to the feeling  that this couldn't possibly be him. But this is what his disease had reduced him to, a wraithlike figure with feverish eyes and a sort of eerie half-smile with a missing tooth.

I was going to scan and post those pictures, and found that I couldn't. Instead I found the tribute I wrote which was published in the Globe, with a picture that reflects who he really was, until mental illness ate him alive.

So why do I do this to myself? I don't know, and this entry may soon be deleted like the last two. But maybe not. I don't feel hopeless now, but I am struggling, and I do keep wondering if this is my last year on earth, or at least my last year with some semblance of health.

And Christmas is coming. Glen once wrote about his two "slips", lapses in his hard-won sobriety, once at an airport and again at Christmas, "those twin museums of lonely hearts". 

I  recognize the horror in how he ended it, but he had a deep  and abiding compassion for the down-and-out, and even counselled people in halfway houses who were trying to make their way back to some semblance of a normal life. "It is so hard," he told me. The fact he was found frozen beside the railroad tracks had a sort of macabre poetry to it that he might have appreciated.

"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind. . . " And don't think I haven't thought about it - I keep a stockpile of pills that I have hoarded over the years, just in case.  I no longer frequent airports, but that other museum of  lonely hearts, Christmas, is speeding towards me like an inexorable set of headlights. 

But I keep getting up in the morning. So far. 

Glen would have wanted it that way.