The Griswolds' Christmas lights

Margaret's Facebook Year In Review!

Don't you just love it when Facebook tenderly, lovingly responds to all your most personal needs? These are photos which Facebook has chosen, JUST FOR ME, to represent my joyous, hectic-but-lovely, event-tumbling year.

Here's me in Palm Beach. Oops. I'm not there. Where am I?

It took me a while to figure this out. Facebook randomly picks photos from all the things you've posted, then whacks them together in any old order to represent the Jolly Chaos That Is Your Life.

It was difficult to meet the Beatles in 2015 (in black and white, yet - and in the Cavern, which was bulldozed 50 years ago). But I must have done it, because here they are - even though two of them are dead.

I didn't realize my year had been so filled with bigotry, prejudice, discrimination, conflict, hate, etc. until I saw this. Now I know. (Actually, that's a picture of me on a bad hair day.)

This is cute, but it ran in a British newspaper in 2013. I'm not sure what it has to do with my Year In Review, except that - hey, I DID get a cat this year.

Wow! This has me in it! Unfortunately, it is me in 1983.

This image had more "likes" than anything else I posted in 2015. An accomplishment in itself, don't you think?  Isn't getting lots of "likes" really the reason we go on living, in a world full of stress, toil, Isis and climate change? The picture was grabbed totally at random off Google Images when I wanted an autumn scene as a screensaver. Then I cropped it into a square for my FB profile picture, just because I already had it.

Actually, no. . . it might have been THIS one that had all the "likes", over 40 of them, which for me is phenomenal. For someone else, pathetic. The "oooohs" and "ahhhhhs" over this were quite impressive, considering I had no idea where it was taken, and didn't much care. The significant thing, though, is that out of Facebook's carefully-chosen selection of personalized Year in Review photos, two of them were almost identical (as well as having nothing to do with me!).

The thing most people don't realize, which I found out by accident, is that each time you open your Facebook Year in Review, you get a different set of twelve photos, taken completely at random from your status updates. People look at this and go "awwww. . . ", believing that "someone" at Facebook, some dimpled dowager with her hair in a grey bun, is thinking of them, carefully and lovingly selecting each personal photo from a crumbling old album with black pages (removing the stick-on corners first), when it is actually created by some vast engine of cloud-infected Orwellia. People open it and see photos from 2015, and they sort of make sense as a year-end review (people have a habit of making things make sense: see psychics, Donald Trump, etc.), but mine don't. I love to play with images and use a lot of different ones, but as you can see, almost none of them pertain to me personally.

Never mind, Orwellia B. Cloud chooses her photos with such care that even YOU don't know why they're so significant.

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Two turtle doves: sheer beauty

The Twelve Gifs of. . . whatever. . .

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my Giphy gave to me. . .

Twelve drummers drumming

Eleven pipers piping

Ten lords a-leaping

Nine ladies dancing

Eight maids a-milking

Seven swans a-swimming

Six geese a-laying

FIVE GOLDEN RINGS

Four calling birds

Three French hens

Two turtle doves

And a hm hm-mm in a hm hmm.

EXPLANATION. You know that I explain myself far too often. Or I just think of something else and tack it on, in non-linear fashion. I started off by testing out my "new" (to me) Giphy program. It's really quite good and dead-easy to use, fast, and lets you use tenths of a second. They're also clearer and much larger, so you can post them original size. Big drawback, they're only half the length, but isn't it better to have a system that actually WORKS?

In testing it out, I must have been in a Freudian free-associating festive mood or something, as I wanted to see what a real turtle dove looked like. Then TWO turtle doves, and then, oh God. I was giffing them all over the place. And one thing led to another.

In most cases I have free-associated, and in nearly all cases I've been free with the numbers. I hate math anyway and am no good at it, still count by shooting my fingers and get lost after seven. My IQ is 143, which is not too shabby, though I guess it could be higher. It's just curious I can't count, is all.

So twelve drummers drumming get collapsed down into one. That's close enough, isn't it? I was going to try to get an image of Ringo at his drum kit, but then thought: Jesus, that's dumb and unimaginitive. So I ended up with one raw turkey drumstick, which is pretty festive when you think about it, especially when being rinsed under the tap.

Eleven pipers piping was at first going to be someone filling a hash pipe or a bong or something, but there were THOUSANDS of pot videos to choose from, all of them made by people who were extremely stoned. So it ended up being a piping bag, which is every bit as nice, don't you think?

Ten lords a-leaping. I cannot explain this one, except that "lords a-leaping" reminded me of Stephen Fry. I don't know if he leaps or not, but here he's getting jiggy while sitting in a chair. I love the psychedelic lighting, a nice touch.

Nine ladies dancing. The tango scene from the movie Frida seemed like a natural. Pretend there are nine of them if you're a stickler. I especially love Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. He's perfect, and believable. Without him the whole movie would collapse under its own pretentions.

Eight, seven, six, five. . . 

Four calling birds might be a bit confusing. Forget the four, for one thing. Forget the calling. This is a BIRD, as in British bird, as in Twiggy. I was sick of birds anyway. In this whole song there are twenty-three birds, which is like twenty-two too many.

And the rest takes care of itself.

Riverview: you mean it's for mental health?

Riverview Lands revisioning to include new mental health buildings

Three programs will be relocated to two new buildings under a revisioning plan for the lands

CBC News Posted: Dec 17, 2015 2:26 PM PT Last Updated: Dec 17, 2015 2:26 PM PT

Fraser Health currently operates three mental health facilities on the Riverview Lands. (CBC)

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The B.C. government says it plans to build two new buildings on the Riverview Lands in Coquitlam and relocate three mental health programs to the site, as part of its redevelopment.

The new facilities are part of a master plan released Thursday morning by B.C. Housing that will eventually include new market and social housing on the site.

Entitled A Vision for Renewing Riverview Lands, the report is the first step in developing a master development plan that will include a healthcare district as well as market and supportive housing.

The overall aim of the project is to redevelop the site on a break-even model, meaning that the construction or renovation of new healthcare facilities would be funded by commercial development of the land, mostly for housing.

The commitment includes spending approximately $175 million to build a 105-bed mental health facility to replace the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction, and a second new building to house the 28-bed Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre and the 10-bed Provincial Assessment Centre.

The Kwikwetlen First Nation has maintained its aboriginal right and title to the land. In a statement, the band said it expects to see significant market development of the land, including for market housing and it objected to any continued use or expansion of healthcare facilities without its prior consent.
100 years of mental health care

The Riverview Lands have been the site of B.C.'s primary mental health facilities for about 100 years when the Colony Farm was established.

But in the 1980s, the Social Credit government came up with a plan to close Riverview and attempt to integrate mental health patients back into communities.





Riverview Hospital was downsized over the course of a decade in favour of locating mental health services in the community, a strategy that met with mixed success. (coqutlam.ca)

While that plan met with mixed success, over the next few decades the hospital wards were shutdown and now the site has been sitting mostly empty — except for three small mental health facilitiesoperated by Fraser Health.

About 75 buildings remain on the site, but many are not longer in use and would require extensive renovations to put back into use.
Riverview Hospital: a brief history

Riverview is listed in the top ten of Canada's most endangered heritage sites by the Heritage Canada Foundation.

As a result in 2013 the government, in order to involve the stakeholders in developing a long-term plan, launched the revisioning process for the 100-hectare site, which includes extensive forests and 1,800 mature trees.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. This is just the most bizarre thing. Riverview originally began as an old-fashioned mental hospital, the type with shackles and shock and cold water, then when psychiatry became more "enlightened" it basically dumped everyone out on the street and said, "Go!" These patients were supposed to be sustained by "resources in the community" which turned out to be non-existent. The result was an epidemic of homelessness and drug dependency.

On the plus side, the Riverview grounds became a lucrative site for the filming of horror movies and made quite a name for itself, no doubt reinforcing a few stereotypes along the way. These plans to turn Riverview BACK into a mental health facility make me either want to laugh, or cry, or both. Nor is there any admission of wrongdoing - in fact, the tone of this article is quite self-congratulatory. The most they will admit to is "mixed success" with their patient-dumping scheme, when everyone in the health care field (who has the guts to be honest) calls it an unmitigated disaster. But no: the article has the tone of "look at this wonderful thing we're doing for the mental health care community!" But I'm afraid the new buildings won't be quite creepy enough to film another Stephen King movie.

I do remember the sign that was posted outside the gloomy old grounds, Riverview's "Mission Statement": "Transforming mental illness into mental wellness." Crap. I say crap because this is the kind of assumption that actually hurts psychiatric patients. It's an assumption that everyone can be "normalized", that everyone is fully employable and capable of a productive, happy life on society's restrictive, narrow, judgemental terms. Not many schizophrenics ever reach that goal, and for a person with  bipolar disorder it's hit-or-miss.

So is this a step forward? Step in the right direction? It was not long ago there was talk that the historic Riverview grounds which everyone babbles so proudly about was going to be sold to developers for yet another mass of condos. But it didn't happen, maybe because of all those Stephen King movies, or the thought that (shudder) "mental patients" had once walked these grounds in the dead of the night.

In case you doubt me, I've written more than once about mental patient Halloween costumes complete with straitjackets, giant syringes and Hannibal Lector-style face masks. "Danger! Escaped mental patient!" is a common front-yard sign to celebrate this festive occasion. Pretty funny stuff, so long as people only have to play at it.

I watched my brother disappear into a twilight world in the 1970s, and we never really saw him again, or saw him whole. Bouts in the Clarke Institute in Toronto seemed to do more harm than good. Finally, my brilliant, charming, charismatic brother died in a fire, the result of having to squat  in an old building because he wasn't able to support himself, though he was a very gifted musician who played in professional orchestras when he was well enough.

But he wasn't well enough, most of the time. He wasn't fully employable, and he lived hand-to-mouth, sheltered in Buddhist and Sikh temples by the only people who ever showed him any compassion. He wasn't well enough because schizophrenia is a chronic illness that can be managed but not cured, and he had little or no resources to manage it.

I lost him in  1980, the year John Lennon died. I now see that the psychiatric "community", as it is euphemistically known, did him far more harm than good. They labelled him "a schizophrenic", and because identity was a difficult thing for him, he took the label on and lived within it while we all helplessly watched.

So for this, and countless other reasons, I continue to write about this subject. If you think mental illness isn't stigmatized, try having it for ONE day.  You'll either feel it from the outside, or the inside. You'll wince at straitjacket costumes and horror movies filmed on grounds that once tried to do some good, with actors in mental patient costumes running around with bloody axes.

I wonder, sometimes, if it's ever going to be any different. If I hear about this subject at all, four words are always blasted at me: REACH OUT FOR HELP.  What help - where? Do people think you can just walk into the hospital and say, "Help me"? You can't check yourself in, folks. Even your doctor can't check you in. No one can, because there are never any beds. After a four or five-hour wait, they'll likely send you home with a prescription. Kind of a waste of energy, don't you think?

The "reach out for help" mantra dumps responsibility for illness and recovery back in the patient's lap at a time when he or she can barely function. Friends and family members get burned out and often don't want yet another (complaining?) phone call in the middle of the night. Nobody thinks about that, do they? So where IS the help, if there is any?

But never mind, there is a certain agency that takes care of the overflow. I don't think I need to tell you what that is.

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George Gershwin: The Graceful Ghost

Gershwin is a time traveller - you can see him out of the corner of your eye. He did not die in the normal sense of the word, because he did not know where he was. He was in a very high fever and dying all alone in a hospital room after failed brain surgery. When he left his body, he experienced extreme disorientation and for quite a while did not realize he was dead. This meant that a light, loose Gershwin-shaped energy field still moved about the world, and lit up whenever his music was played (which was almost all the time). After a very long time, though it was a mere moment in eternity, he began to realize who and how he actually was, that he was no longer in a body and would have to exist in a very different form. Being a soul sojourner from the beginning, this was not a threat but an adventure to him. But even in spite of this necessary metamorphosis, to a remarkable degree, he retained a George Gershwin shape. No matter what sort of problems he was having in his life, and he had many that we don't know anything about, there was a ferocious static-charged supernatural pumped boost of energy that somehow kept on connecting people with each other when he was around. But ironically, in spite of his sacred mission to join people joyously,in his life he had many struggles with intimacy, which led to a loneliness even as he was the most popular man in the room. During this strange leaving-his-body-and-not-being-sure-where-he-was period, he began to have extraordinary insight into not just his own condition, but the human condition.

 GG's emotional affect and his emotions seemed curiously light, but there was a galaxy of melancholy within that he did not show to too many people. The stars in that galaxy exploded out of his fingers and his brain and were made manifest as notes of music on the page. Though he lived at a hurtling pace few people could equal, little did he know that he was absorbing all of humanity's travails, gaining an understanding of suffering that would not be fully realized until he found himself in a different form outside his body. It would have been unbearably painful, had his life (as he knew it) not been over, a blessed cessation of all earthly pain. When a soul or entity gains this sort of awareness, mysterious alchemy takes place because the need here on earth for that level of understanding is so dire. Those pained and anguished places in that broken thing we call the human condition began to draw and attract this generous, gentle, deeply broken spirit. There was Gershwin dust in the room sifting down like stardust, particularly when there was music playing. And there was music playing a lot. 

Someone, not keeping up their guard, felt something strange or warm and not quite familiar in the room, yet also hauntingly familiar. Someone else thought they saw him for a second, or someone that looked like him. There was in some subconscious way a powerful sense that a healing was beginning to happen. As the entity begins to heal, so it heals itself. George's brain gave way, the most disturbing way to die, so that he was basically humbled by losing the genius brain he was celebrated for. Stripped of that, even of that, all that was left was his essence. How can I say how this happens? How can I be sure that George Gershwin is a time traveller and an entity who is basically free to move about within time and space wherever and whenever he wishes?

BLOGGER'S NOTE. Since writing this, one of the first passages I ever wrote about Gershwin and my sense of close contact with him, I found a number of other writings that made my scalp prickle. It does make me wonder: does he have the capacity to move back and forth between worlds, or has he decided to stay in this one, wandering around as curiously and restlessly as he did in life?

My wonderful George experience was completely derailed when everything I wrote was shot down by a so-called friend, a spiritualist medium who has decided to set up his own little fiefdom and call himself God. To be honest, it came out he never actually read any of the things I sent him, but was still certain that it was all bogus. This was also true when he dismissed my first complete novel as "a zany soap opera" (having never read THAT either). Later, when he half-assedly apologized, he said I had "triggered his issues", meaning "you made me do it."

To my chagrin, the entire thing dropped out from under me and disappeared, and I felt considerable grief. I had to keep moving forward and practically stopped thinking about it. He had triggered embarrassment in me, which I guess was what he wanted. But I had trusted him, and now I didn't know why I took that risk.

Then the other day, someone or something entered my office - just came in, I mean. Didn't so much waft or float or materialize like the ghost of Jacob Marley. He just walked in, like Love in that song. He walked in on my left side and came around so I was facing him and I saw that sweet, familiar look and that indescribable vibe.

George was back.

Below are a couple of quotes from the many (many, many) books on George. It seems he does appear to people, including his own sad, bereaved brother/writing partner, Ira. It's too bad he could not have enjoyed the visit more, sad that he was so terrified at George's friendly, unspectral return.  I feel George as the most gorgeous, the most glorious presence, but at the same time soft, tender - really, quite indescribable, the most beautiful of vibes stealing into the room.

“George even passed the most acid of tests for great leadership by remaining a presence to his followers even after he’d left the planet. Ann ‘Willow Weep for Me’ Ronell told me some half century after his death that she still ‘saw’ Gershwin regularly in the crowds of the Upper West Side, looking as if he’d just walked out the door. And on that same day, Burton ‘How About You’ Lane testified to an even more precise epiphany. Lane had recently been to a concert of Gershwin’s newly-refurbished piano rolls being played on a baby grand pianola in a pool of spotlight. And as the notes began to go mechanically down and up, ‘There was George for a moment,’ he exclaimed, ‘playing away. I almost passed out.’”

- The House that George Built, Wilfrid Shed

"As Ira grew older, he became not less but more obsessed with George. When he was in his eighties, Michael Feinstein, who had become something of a surrogate son to him, heard him talking to George in his sleep. These were, according to Feinstein, 'lengthy conversations' that were 'often filled with anger, centering around Ira's desire not to stay here on earth and George's insistence that he stay.' Just before Ira's death in 1983, he revealed to Feinstein in a hushed voice something he had never told anyone else. Shortly after George's passing, he had looked into his brother's workroom upstairs at 1019 North Roxbury and seen him 'sitting on the sofa, smiling and nodding to me. It terrified me. I wasn't drinking. I wasn't drunk. But I saw him.'"

- George Gershwin, An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler

Henrietta and Merna Can't Sing - Go Tell It On The Mountain

Christmas is dead, and we have killed it.

The Chipmunks - at NORMAL speed!

This is why I go on living  - well - this and a few other things. I have always wondered at the back of my demonic little brain what Alvin and the Chipmunks would sound like at NORMAL SPEED. Now I know, and it is even creepier than I imagined. Of course the David Seville voice is draggy and slow, but then come these three ordinary-sounding male voices - no, wait, ONE person doing three different voices with very exaggerated diction, I guess "so people will understand it". I think this was their first hit, though that awful one about "I wanna play my harmonica" must have been a close second. The bickering little argument at the end becomes a nightmare of threatened violence, with three men yelling at each other and a glandular giant bawling horribly at them all.

Merry Christmas!

Santa has had a bad year

Goat, tell it on the mountain!

It's a Wonderful Life: chicken on a spit

This thing comes on every year and I get caught up in it, even worse than Taxi Driver. And I forget every year that it's the longest, most suffocating piece of drama ever created. A festive favorite about a man who wants to commit suicide because his life has been an exercise in futility and failed dreams, capped off by a totally unfair charge of bank fraud.

Ah! It's a Wonderful Life. Ringling, tingling Christmas trees, Zoo-zoo's petals, bleeding lips, newel-post knobs nearly hurled across the room. Chickens on a spit, bar brawls on Christmas Eve, irrelevant songs about Buffalo Gals, and wild-eyed overacting all around.

Dis guy, see, he's like, um. Kind of disillusioned, like, cuz. His Uncle Billy, who's half nuts but was the father in Gone with the Wind so sort-of famous, has lost the eight thousand dollars that the Bailey Savings and Loan has earned in the past fifty years or so. He sort of dropped it somewhere and the Big Fat Man, the Bad Man, Lionel Barrymore in his most Grinchimous role, went and spent it on a hooker or something.

So da guy, this George, he decides he's worth more dead than alive (do I hear silver bells?), and stands there not jumping off a bridge. Then this old guy in a nightgown jumps off the bridge, and. . . the rest is history.

Oh, I shouldn't be so cynical, but this thing - this long thing, this three-hour marathon of hopelessness and small-town suffocation - it's about the farthest thing from festive you could imagine. Even Scrooge has glimmers of hope in it, but this - . George acts like some sortofa downtrodden saint for two hours and forty-nine minutes, then he kind of explodes and screams at his wife and family and tells them he basically hates them for holding him back and completely destroying his life.

His . . . wonderful life.

OK, I have a few problems with the logistics of this thing. When they get married and have to give all their money away to save the bank, Donna Reed gets chickens going on a spit in this old ruin of a house, the one they use-da throw stones at for luck. And they move in to it? make it habitable? On his salary of $2.70 a week or whatever-the-frick-it-is? Raise a family? George wears the same suit for 17 years, for God's sake.

Jimmy Stewart overacts. I'm sorry, but he does, he overshoots. He smears his facial features around with his hand, his hair is wild, he looks like a candidate for the psych ward, and finally he mumbles to his hokey old guardian angel (the guy in the funny shirt that ties up in front because buttons hadn't been invented in the year 1300) that he wishes he'd never been born at all.

Kind of the ultimate in nihilism, wouldn't you say? Jimmy Stewart, the guy with the 6-foot imaginary pet rabbit, the guy in whatever-else-he-was-in, all those Westerns and Mr. Smiths and whatever, attempting to annihilate all traces of his existence on earth. A holiday special? OK, another big problem. He has this obnoxious friend named Sam Wainwright who keeps saying, inexplicably, "hee-haw". A dumb-ass par excellence, he lucks into a strange new business just before the war breaks out:  plastics. This assures he'll be obscenely wealthy doing no work at all.

He's George's best friend, for blippin' sake, and George is all stressed out and wanting to kill himself over 8 thousand dollars when 8 thousand dollars isn't even POCKET CHANGE for Sam Wainwright. In the dramatic ending when everyone turns their linty little pockets inside-out for George, he gets some kind-of-a cable from Wainwright saying, in so many words, "your measly little problem that you were willing to die over is peanuts to me. I'll give you three times that amount and change. There, feel better now?"

I doubt if he would. But think about it. Would Wainwright ever let George be dragged off to jail for such a shabby little amount? Money is power, right? Wainwright could make Old Man Potter dance like a jerky little marionette on a cold winter's night, and George is all stressed out about jail? (I liked his idea that Uncle Billy should go, instead. Made sense to me.)

But hey. He might get conjugal visits from that, who's that little floozie anyway? Jeez, what's she doing in this thing which is spozed to be a family show?

Oh, oh, and I just thought of this: it gets me every year. Why is it that after George yells at Uncle Billy that he's a mental defective, a moron and a lunatic, a squirrel jumps up on his arm? What the - ?? a squirrel? Up to now we've only seen ravens, tortoises, cows, etc. Could this be a foreshadowing of the squirrel from hell in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? (Actually, it screams of "cut the animal scenes, this thing is running too long." But for some reason they left in the squirrel.)

This time around (when as usual I kept saying, "OK, I'll turn it off in another 5 minutes" for 6 consecutive hours), I noticed a few other discrepancies, such as George's mother (Beulah Bondi) bawling and dabbing at her eyes during the final cash-spilling orgy in George's living room. Well, about ten minutes ago when George was on the phone with his brother Harry in Washington, where he just got the Congressional Medal of Honor for filing his nails or something, George repeats to the listening crowd, "Mother just had lunch with the President's wife."

Not only do the writers of this thing obviously not know who the President was then, but Mother must be able to teleport herself from Washington to Bedford Falls in a matter of seconds! Hey, lady, tell me how you can be in two places at the same time and I'll buy the patent.

But I gots-ta confess to one thing. No matter how I prepare myself for it, no matter how cynical I try to feel, no matter how cornball I know it will be (and it is), that final scene has me bawling every time. Just bawling. I don't know what it is. The generosity of the people. The look of astonishment on George's face. Zoo-zoo's petals. Beulah Bondi, beamed down from the planet Zargon.

I remember a superb SCTV satire of this scene, in which a succession of ever-more-notable people kept sweeping through the door, from George's brother to the President of the United States to, finally, His Holiness the Pope. It's a potent fantasy, all right - one we wish would come true for ourselves. That one day, in spite of futile sacrifice and grinding toil and zero recognition, something wonderful will happen to make us see that it has all been worthwhile.

This has something to do with the American work ethic, always handing the glory to someone else like that ratfink brother-who-got-the-Congressional-Medal-of-Honor-while-we-got-stuck-with-goddamn-rubber-drives-during-the-freaking-war. Let's face it, there are more Georges than Harries in the world. We all have our lunatic uncles, our goddamn rubber drives. Our eight thousand dollars.

And if George hadn't-a saved Harry when he slid down on that slippery old thingammy on the ice, why then -

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