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?

Suicide: in the jaws of the dragon

Since my readership is very slim, to say the least, I feel relatively free to talk about a subject no one seems to want to mention. It's tiptoed around, or recoiled from, both from fear it will happen to someone they know, or from the kind of entrenched stigma that buries certain topics due to intense shame.

I heard of a death not long ago, and it was not someone I knew. I read the announcement on a friend's Facebook page, and even though I am removed from the situation, I found it disturbing. It pertained to a 42-year-old man, a teacher, who died suddenly and shockingly, leaving the family "devastated". There was a very long passage about what a beloved figure he was among his students and colleagues. All through this description of the man's life, I kept thinking, suicide. I could not be sure, but it was written all over the passage, the shock and despair that seemed beyond a more natural death. Certainly no other cause of death was listed anywhere, which was unusual for one so young. Even the long passage about his achievements and his status as a much-loved figure carried a faint sense of "we don't know how this could have happened to a man like this". Not homeless, not a drug addict or an alcoholic, but the kind of person who would never think of such a thing because he was so  accomplished and well-liked.

Then, a couple of weeks later, there was a sort of updated statement, saying that the family had thought it over and decided to talk about the fact that he had committed suicide. One of the first things they said (which was also included in the first notice) was how gentle his passing had been. They insisted "he felt no pain". I was stunned. I have experienced suicidal depression, and it's like trying to pull yourself out of the mouth of a dragon before you are ripped apart or immolated. There is no peace. It is never painless. How could it be, if you've just decided to destroy yourself and deprive the world of a totally unique human presence - forever?

I assume they were referring to his lack of pain AS he committed suicide, or lack of pain AFTER he committed suicide - neither of which make sense to me at all. No, you don't feel pain when you are unconscious. Or dead.

I don't blame the family for all these tortuous twists and turns. Obviously it's important to them to think he didn't suffer, which after a suicide is as incongruous a statement as I have ever heard. I cannot be too judgemental, however, as they were reacting the way 90% of people do. But it does point up how people struggle with this raw fact, that people do, yes, DO commit suicide, even if their anguish and despair isn't obvious to others. ESPECIALLY if. This man had been, apparently, acting for most of his life, and one day he just couldn't do it any more. Or so it would seem.

More odd things struck me. The fact that his memorial is taking place in a bar shook me, because then I wondered if he was an alcoholic. Perhaps not, and I am sure the family would vehemently, even angrily deny this. But surely, somewhere in academia, someone else might be - statistically, even! - and perhaps a recovering one. Someone who can't or must not drink would have to sit around with people who are drinking, perhaps rather heavily because they are in so much pain, supposedly in their colleague's honor, and the alcoholic at the table - even if sober - must sit there smiling with a gut full of unexpressed grief. 

The expectation is that everyone will sit around sipping scotch (they even mentioned this specifically) and heartily sharing funny and fond reminiscences and anecdotes about a man who JUST KILLED HIMSELF BECAUSE HE COULDN’T STAND BEING ALIVE ANY MORE. Of course, if you cry and feel agony at such a gathering, it’s completely inappropriate to express it, and you have to leave. What are you supposed to do - sit at a table, in a bar, in a public place, and put your head down on the table and sob with raw anguish? Or is raw anguish completely inappropriate these days?

Your choices are to leave and run to the bathroom (meaning someone else at the table is in the awkward position of having to run after you while the rest of the party looks at each other uncomfortably), to stay and bring the rest of the party down and completely kill the atmosphere of heartiness and humor, or - 

The only option that is socially acceptable is to just swallow your grief and pretend you're all right, even enjoying the evening. Everyone else is, after all - aren't they? If they aren't, who is going to start talking about it and ruin the occasion? You can do your crying  at home.  

But when you get home, you find it has all turned to stone. 

Does this set of impossible choices have anything to do with the social dynamics that lead a man to take his own life? Does it have anything to do with agonizing loneliness, with a sense of being set apart from everyone else, afraid of your own feelings? Of having to "keep it up", swallowing it continually for years and years and keeping the act going until one day it fatally implodes?

Memorials are “celebrations of life” now, with no tears or grief allowed unless it’s “happy” grief (whatever that is). At very least, you are expected to run to the bathroom and do it there, along with other bodily functions. I don't know what the answer is, but when I heard about the memorial in the pub, even in the first announcement where cause of death was mysteriously not mentioned, I winced. The idea of a "wake" may still be around, and I'm not against it, but I don't think these generally take place in a public space. 

There is no suicide rule book, no etiquette, but I am alarmed at how quickly people jump to hide the scars, even to minimize what has happened or reassure everyone that it was, after all, a painless event - at least for him, a man ending his own life. But painless only in the unconsciousness that leads to death, a conundrum I will never be able to resolve.

I loved two men

There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.

Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.

Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.

I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.

As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.

In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”

I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd  the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but  I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.

So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention". 

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.

My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.

I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself!  But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.

But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself.  It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.

There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.

I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.

POST-BLOG.  A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit. 

RUN!!. . . The creepiest place on earth

Sanzhi UFO houses

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sanzhi UFO houses (Chinese: 三芝飛碟屋; pinyin: Sānzhī Fēidiéwū), also known as the Sanzhi pod houses or Sanzhi Pod City, were a set of abandoned and never completed pod-shaped buildings in Sanzhi District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. The buildings resembled Futuro houses, some examples of which can be found elsewhere in Taiwan. The site where the buildings were located was owned by Hung Kuo Group.

Construction and abandonment

The UFO houses were constructed beginning in 1978. They were intended as a vacation resort in a part of the northern coast adjacent to Tamsui, and were marketed towards U.S. military officers coming from their East Asian postings. However, the project was never completed in 1980 due to investment losses and several car accident deaths and suicides during construction, which is said to have been caused by the inauspicious act of bisecting the Chinese dragon sculpture located near the resort gates for widening the road to the buildings. Other stories indicated that the site was the former burial ground for Dutch soldiers.

The pod-like buildings became a minor tourist attraction due in part to their unusual architecture. The structures have since been subject of a film, used as a location by MTV for cinematography, photographed by people, and become a subject in online discussions, described as a ghost town or "ruins of the future". The houses are referred to in the title of a track on the experimental German pianist Hauschka's 2014 LP Abandoned City.

Demolition

The buildings were scheduled to be torn down in late 2008, despite an online petition to retain one of the structures as a museum. Demolition work on the site began on 29 December 2008, with plans to redevelop the site into a tourist attraction with hotels and beach facilities.

By 2010, all of the UFO houses had been demolished and the site was in the process of being converted to a commercial seaside resort and water-park.

Blogger's Blah Blah. This topic was so bizarre that it cried out for an equally bizarre treatment, so I began to make animations, some of which freaked me out so badly I found I couldn't use them. (Maybe I'll post outtakes later on. Or not. A director's cut?) 

I love making cars and buildings and other inanimate things come to life, and it's a cinch with architecture because of all the uniform surfaces. They don't even need to be square. The levels to these things - and by the holy, aren't they the worst-looking things you ever saw? No wonder people thought they were cursed - made it easy to make them flap and applaud and otherwise jump around. But God, it was tiring, and WEIRD. Just plain weird. 

This isn't the first time I encountered Pod City - I remember reading about it years ago. One of the photos was an aerial view that made me reel. It was like a host of evil mushrooms squatting and rotting on the ground.

There is a slight cheat here. The yellow structures in some of the gifs are likely Futuro houses, which I don't even want to get into. They look UFO-ish in the most classic My Favorite Martian sense, with evil portals all around them that stare like malevolent eyes. My God. There are some of them left in Taiwan, most of them rotting away, but the original Pod City has been demolished and is (supposedly!) no more. If this were the X Files, Scully and Mulder would be on it by now.

http://www.stopabductions.com/