I started out life as a military dependant. Got to see the country from one side to the other, at a cost.
Tattoos and peircings are a hobby of mine.
I'm a 4th Class Power Engineer.
And I love filing ATIP requests with the Federal Government.
Okay, so I’ll talk a little bit about the procedure itself.
If I am approved, I hope to undergo the injection method as opposed to the oral method. Yes, both methods are supposed to result in a painless death, but I favour the injection method due to the swiftness.
Which ever method I’m allowed to undertake, I have to initiate it. Whether it’s drinking the glass of barbiturates or pressing the trigger button for the dosing pumps, it’s the patient undergoing the procedure that has to initiate the procedure.
With the oral method you consume a large amount of barbiturates in liquid form. This is supposed to induce unconsciousness and eventually cardiac arrest. Time to death varies from person to person. This is not the way I want to go. I can’t even stand most over-the-counter or prescription pain killers. And the idea of dying from a drug overdose doesn’t appeal to me.
The injection method is almost clinical in its efficiency and swiftness. There are three or four drugs used depending on the drugs selected.
The first drug to be introduced would be Midazolam. Midazolam is a sedative. This is not used to render the person unconscious. This is really just to make the person feel comfortable. Face it, no matter how intense the desire to die, when you’re lying down on your literal death bed with the cannula in your vein, anxiety can become your enemy.
The next drug to be introduced would be Propofol. Propofol is typically used prior to the administration of anesthesia in surgical procedures. For surgical procedures Propofol is usually administered at a rate of 2 mg/kg. In my case, if I was going for surgery I would get a dosage of about 180 mg. However, in the case of M.A.i.D. I would be receiving a doseof 1,000 mg. At this dosing level I will be put into a very deep coma and would lose consciousness and all sensation.
The third drug to be introduced would be Rocuronium. Rocuronium is a neuromuscular blocking agent that targets striated muscles. The Rocuronium would act upon my diaphragm and cease my breathing.
The final drug to be introduced would be Bupivacaine. Bupivacaine would cause cardiac arrest and stop my heart.
So basically the Midazolam is to calm me down prior to the Propofol. The Propofol is to shut my brain down so that I am unaware of the resulting asphyxiation and subsequent cardiac arrest. With the advent of cardiac arrest, arterial blood pressure in my brain would drop to nothing which means that even if the Propofol were to somehow wear off, I would never regain consciousness.
I’m not exactly sure how long after my heart stops before I will be pronounced clinically dead, but it wouldn’t be too long.
The interesting thing is, it won’t just be me dying. It will be P.S., Captain McRae, the man in the sauna, Captain Totzke, my father. There will be no more depression. There will be no more anxiety. There will be no more night terrors. There will be no more grinding my teether. There will be nothing.
I am an atheist.
I don’t believe in magical special friends or an invisible father figure peering down on me from the clouds.
I may be an atheist, but I’ve never had issues with my morals unlike men of the cloth like Captain Father Angus McRae or Brigadier General Roger Bazin.
Being an atheist means that I don’t believe the the great beyond, or the magical city in the sky. Conversely I don’t believe in the fire and brimstone pits of hell.
When I die, I will simply cease to exist.
Will I miss anything after I am dead? No, I’ll be dead.
Will I be sad when I die and will I be full of regret? No, I’ll be dead.
Life is not a competition to see who can live the longest.
You live the life you have.
You do the best with it that you can.
Life is not a miracle. There are over 7 billion people on the planet.
Society is weird in the sense that if I’m out riding my bicycle and I get hit by a car, “oh well, life goes on”. If I go snowboarding down a mountain and crash into a tree “Oh well, he died doing what he liked to do”. If I had developed a drug habit and died of a heroin overdose, everyone would be talking about how rough of a life I had and how it wasn’t fair that I died. Yet if someone undergoes severe psychological trauma society gets all sanctimonious if the topic of suicide or M.A.i.D. comes up. I can go scuba diving with the sharks or skydiving out of a perfectly functional airplane and society is fine with that. Struggle with the fallout from being sexually abused as a child on a military base, gotta keep on struggling. Apparently it builds character.
If this had been 40 years ago, just after the abuse but prior to Captain Totzke getting his hooks into my brain, yeah, maybe counselling or drug therapy could have worked.
I’m fifty years old in a few short days. I’ve had the events from CFB Namao playing back in my head non-stop since 1980. And I think the effect was made even worse by the fact that Captain Totzke and my father both blamed me for what happened and they both blamed me for allowing the babysitter to go after my younger brother.
So it’s not just the untreated trauma from sexual abuse that I’m dealing with, I’m dealing with the fucked up counselling from the military social worker that I receive back then and the scapegoating. Yes, the release of records by DND did vindicate me. But that doesn’t undo the damage done. In fact in some ways knowing that DND and the Canadian Forces knew the truth all along makes the pain even worse.
So, when do I intend to go to sleep?
Well, March 2023 would be the soonest.
But realistically it will probably be closer to 2025 or 2026.
I don’t know what the criteria will be or how many tests I would have to undergo. I would imagine that there would be more than a two question multiple choice questionnaire .
I don’t know if my current physician would be willing to prescribe me the medications or even cannulate me and connect the IV lines and the pumps. Even though I would have to push the button to initiate the process, my doctor would be the one who would have to insert the cannulas and be ready to do manual injections if something went wrong with the pumps. This might cause some physicians to not be willing to participate.
I would like to stick around a while to see what happens with my class action lawsuit. But I do fear that DND and the Department of Justice will try to drag this matter out for as long as possible in the courts. I have no intention of waiting 10 years.
Place of death? More than likely at home in my own bed. Lay down for one final sleep and never wake up again.
What happens after?
Hopefully I get to go to medical school or a body farm.
If I seem cavalier about death, it’s probably just that I refuse to be afraid of death.
The fact is everyone dies. Death is a normal part of life. There is no escaping death no matter how much you want to wish it away.
I don’t want my body pumped full of chemicals and stuck in the ground.
Send me to medical school and let the students learn.
Cut my brain apart and try to figure out why I never ended up on the streets with addiction problems.
Put me on a body farm and let the forensics investigators learn their techniques.
Okay, so I’m going to delve a little bit into the topic of M.A.i.D. and why I am hoping to be able to avail myself to this procedure.
Let’s face it. I’ve been through quite a lot in this life. And what I’ve been through has left me with some very significant long term psychological issues.
Major depression and severe anxiety would be the most significant issues that I struggle with. Yes, the medications that I am on now have calmed the storm, but the storm is still there. And the storm always will be.
Depression and anxiety have genetic roots. And if I had to say who I inherited what from I’d say that my depression came from my father’s genes and my anxiety came from my mother’s genes.
I went through 1-1/2 years of very depraved and graphic sexual abuse. I went through about 2-1/2 years of “counselling” with Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke, who was anything but concerned with my mental well-being and was more concerned with keeping the secrets of CFB Namao under wraps, even it that meant depriving me of the psychiatric care that I needed at the time.
My childhood was spent living in the household of a rage fuelled alcoholic with his own inner demons that he could barely deal with.
Because of the meddling of Captain Totzke, I have issues with gender identity and sexual orientation.
I have a lot of people living in my head, and none of them are pleasant. They keep coming back in unwanted flashbacks. If somebody touches me unexpectedly I react. I don’t like being touched. Period. And it’s very hard to be intimate with someone when you don’t like touching.
P.S., Captain McRae, the man from the sauna, Captain Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, they’re all up there. My father, Richard Gill is up there screaming and yelling about how I fucked with his military career.
I don’t like sex. I guess the lessons that I learnt from 9 to 11 was that sex was disgusting and wrong, just as I was disgusting and wrong for having done what I did on CFB Namao when I was 7 to 8.
Even though I now understand that the mess on CFB Namao was far larger than me apparently enjoying what the 15 year old babysitter was doing to me and in turn allowing the 15 year old babysitter to molest my younger brother, I can’t rewire my brain. Nobody can. There is no erasure procedure that will remove all of this crap.
I don’t want to learn how to deal with it or cope with it. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t want it, and it’s not up to me to live with it.
Death isn’t something that I’ve just begun to long for recently. It’s been with me since the days of CFB Namao.
The problem though is that no matter how much I really wanted to die, working up the will to follow through is something else.
I have come close in the past. You can’t go through what I did and not want to die. I know of two men who took their own lives due to the events on CFB Namao. How many others took their own lives we’ll never know. There is no way on Earth that the Canadian Armed Forces will go overturning the stones of history.
The closest I came was back in 1994. What stopped me was the image of P.S. and my father holding hands and laughing their heads off like they were buddies.
In the days and years after CFB Namao I must would frequently fantasize my own death and that after my death the police would investigate my father and off to jail he would go.
The more I learnt about suicide over the years, the less inclined I became to commit it. Most suicides are not successful, and if you think you’ve got problems prior to suicide, depending an how bad you botch things up, you’re going to have significantly more problems after.
Suicide is messy. And it’s often not quick. And it’s really not fair to those who discover you and who have to clean up the mess. And it often leaves those who knew you with all sorts of unanswered questions.
In the early aughts I started hearing of medically assisted suicide in places like Scandinavia and I was fascinated. Most if not all of the countries that offered medically assisted suicide didn’t often include depression. It wasn’t until the late aughts early ’10s that I started hearing about medically assisted suicide for depression.
But the reality always was that even if European and Scandinavian countries were allowing people to die who only had mental issues such as depression, there was no way I was going to be able to afford a flight over there.
So my hopes and desires kinda took a back seat.
And besides, I was just about to start discovering the whole rancid truth about CFB Namao and about who knew what back then. The more I learnt about CFB Namao, the more I decided that I needed to stay alive to at least clear my name and see this mess through to a conclusion.
In 2019, something in the Canadian media caught my eye. Due to a court decision in Quebec, the Government of Canada was expected to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to allow medical assistance in dying (M.A.i.D.) in circumstances in which the person requesting M.A.i.D. was experiencing pain, but was not near the expected terminal end of their life. Prior to this, M.A.i.D. could only be given if a person requested it and that person was expected to die naturally in the imminent future.
Parliament passed the amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada in March of 2021 to allow M.A.i.D. in cases where death was not imminent. However, what caught my attention was that the Senate, in reviewing the bill, had determined that to not allow a person suffering solely from psychiatric issues to request M.A.i.D. could be seen as a Charter issue.
Parliament has until March 17th, 2023 to pass the required legislation to allow M.A.i.D. for psychiatric issues such as depression.
Well, it’s now 2021. I’ve somewhat cleared my name. I know that the Canadian Forces knew full well what happened back in 1979 to 1980. I also know why it was buried.
I have a class action lawsuit that is heading before a justice in the spring of 2022. The class action came about due to the release of Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit investigation, both of with indicted that the military police in 1980 were full well aware of what P.S. was doing with younger children on the base and that it was Captain McRae that had taught P.S. and encouraged P.S. to behave in the manner that he did.
I don’t know what the rules will be in March of 2023. I can’t imagine it being something as simple as just walking into your doctor’s office and saying “Doc, I’m depressed, I want to die”. There will more than likely be a barrage of psychiatric tests and evaluations. I will probably have to convince the majority of a panel of at least 3 medical professionals that I am sane, competent, and that I am suffering.
If I succeed, then there will be all of the arrangements. I still don’t know what all of the details will be.
or college, or even university. But even if I had done well in school I don’t think those options would have really ever been open to me.
School was an interesting place for me as a kid.
Prior to CFB Namao, school had always been an interesting and fun place.
School however became a place of torment for me in the days after the CFB Namao affair.
CFB Griesbach was no better. Even my teacher noted in one of her reports that the other kids had made me their scapegoat and that I had been ostracized by them.
In November of 1981 Alberta Social Services was in called in by our teachers and principal to deal with me and my brother as Captain Terry Totzke didn’t seem to be making any progress.
When I became involved with Alberta Social Services I had been deemed to be far too emotionally disturbed and that I should be institutionalized in a psychiatric facility. For whatever reason both my father and Totzke never seemed to make much off an effort. I am still of the opinion that the Canadian Forces were doing everything in their power to keep a lid on the Captan McRae child sexual abuse scandal and the fear of Totzke was that if I went into civilian care of any kind that I would start talking about what happened on CFB Namao and that this would cause problems for the Canadian Forces.
In the spring of 1982 my father agreed to place me into the Westfield Program in Edmonton. This required me taking a bus from on the base over to the public school that hosted the program. And what was even better is that this was the proverbial “short bus”. What more could a kid living on a military base ask for than to take the “short bus” to school. I guess social services thought that having the bus pick me up over by the motor pool building instead of from right in front of my PMQ would shield me from embarrassment . But considering that the parking lot by the motor pool was visible to half the PMQs on the lower half of the base, everyone knew who it was that was taking the “short bus”. At least I didn’t have to wear a helmet. And no, I didn’t lick the windows either.
But riding the “short bus” was pretty well the end of any type of friendship that I had on the base as no one wanted to associate with the “weirdo” and the “retard”.
Even my stepmother had referred to me as a “retard” one day and said that it was my fault for going to a school for “retards”. I would have to say that my family’s involvement with Alberta Social Services and Canadian Armed Forces social worker Captain Terry Totzke was causing a lot of stress for both my father who knew what had happened on CFB Namao, and Sue, my stepmother, who probably has never been told about the events of CFB Namao.
As I would learn in 2011, the Westfield program wasn’t for boys who were attracted to other boys as I had been told by both Totzke and my father. Nope, it was for emotionally disturbed children. Children who couldn’t attend regular school because they were emotionally and behaviourally challenged.
To attend this program, the parents of the children had to agree to sign foster care paperwork. I honestly don’t think that Richard realized what he signed as evidenced by what he told Captain Terry Totzke on January 28th, 1983. I now understand that a lot of Richard’s life was spent flying from one catastrophe to another with no real idea of what was going on and no idea of how to take control, always expecting someone else to solve his problems.
Looking back at this time in my life I would have to say that my having developed major depression and severe anxiety isolated me from the other kids.
Throw into that mix that I really didn’t like being touched. Being touched from behind would send me into a panic. Which when you’re dealing with a bunch of 11 year old kids is just guaranteed to bring more touching. But just the feeling of anyone touching my body anywhere would freak me out.
It was noted in one of my psychiatric evaluations that I would often twist and contort my body to avoid being touched.
Also, around this time I had started to develop a very bad habit of wetting the bed. And it was determined in my household that if I didn’t shower before going to school that the embarrassment would make me stop wetting the bed.
Yeah, there were a lot of stupid people with a lot of stupid ideas back then.
At the time I really liked to be left alone to read books. This might explain why even to this day have no issues with reading manuals for equipment
When my father got his posting to Toronto in January of 1983, one of the promises that he made was that I would be placed at the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto for psychiatric care. Well, this didn’t happen.
I was dumped into good old fashioned public school. CFB Downsview, unlike other bases I had lived on, didn’t have schools on base for military children. We all went to public school at local schools off base.
One of the first things the school board had to do was to separate my brother and I and send us to different public schools due to intense sibling rivalry. Near the end of my involvement with Alberta Social Services it was noted that Richard and Sue refused to talk to each other and instead Richard and Sue would talk to each other using my brother and I as the intermediaries. I guess that had really set my brother and I against each other.
Then the school board came to the conclusion that I was having great difficulties making friends and relating to my peers. I soon found myself moved into a class for “special” children. This was Mrs. Bowen’s class. The nice thing about this class is Mrs. Bowen had a small Scottish Terrier named Misty that she brought to school everyday.
Another problem that I had at home with Richard was that he was absolutely useless for help with homework. Asking Richard for help with homework was akin to pulling the pin on a hand grenade and then holding on to it.
Asking Richard for help with homework would often induce one of his “rage out” sessions where fists or back hands would go flying, and then 30 minutes later he wouldn’t “remember” ever having hit you. But then the next day Richard would be all apologetic for maybe getting a little too carried away.
Junior high school was a completely different experience from grade school that I was totally unprepared for. Boys were supposed to have girlfriends. Boys were also supposed to hang out with other boys and talk about cars, and sports, and girls, and women.
For grade 7 I went to Elia Junior High on Sentinel Road. This was about a 40 minute walk to and from school. I could have easily gotten a student bus pass and taken the bus, but Richard wasn’t going to pay for a bus pass.
Again, I was placed into a homeroom for “trouble kids”. Pretty sure this teacher was Marv Schneider.
I had zero interest in cars, I had even less interest in sports. And anything sex related caused me great anxiety as I was fresh out of Captain Totzke’s care. Anything sex related just brought me right back to the sessions with Captain Totzke. And I still couldn’t form friends.
Kids who like to be left alone in junior high school tend to get beat up a lot. Especially if you’re severely depressed and suffer from anxiety.
My grade 7 music teacher, Mrs. Donskov, considered me to be an underprivileged kid from an underprivileged family. She had arranged for me to borrow a bass guitar and an amplifier that she was willing to drop off at my home every Friday night and pick up every Monday morning. My father blew up at her. So, Mrs. Donskov then decided that if my father didn’t want me playing music in the house that maybe he’d sign me up for drumming instruction with a local drum school. Again, more yelling on the phone when she called him to propose her idea.
When I asked my father why he wouldn’t let me play the bass guitar in the PMQ he blathered on about “military housing rules” and how we weren’t allowed to have amplified noises like that. This of course was complete bullshit. I knew of at least four other base brats living in the same PMQ patch that played electric guitar in their house and one who had a drum set in the basement.
Richard was like that though. He would always blame his rash decisions on something else that was out of his control. See, he wouldn’t mind me playing bass guitar in the house, but the military wouldn’t allow it. This to him sounds much better than him admitting that his untreated depression led him to being easily annoyed by noises or anything else that disturbed his thoughts.
At the end of the grade 7 school year I requested a transfer to Pierre Laporte Junior High as it would only be a ten minute walk from the base to the school.
Pierre Laporte was no better than Elia, but at least I wasn’t in a special ed program. And I didn’t need a bus pass, walking to school was simple.
Same thing though, no interest in cars, no interest in sports, no interest in girls or women means that you got a lot of beatings for being a fag or a queer.
I got beat up so many times at Pierre Laporte. And it was almost always the same clique of kids. G.P., S., R.K., R.A., and a few others that hung around with these four.
Mr. Richard Ford was the music teacher at this school. He realized that I had a knack for rhythm and tempo and that I picked up working with MIDI based synthesizers and Apple Mac MIDI software. I also seemed to have a fairly decent ear for mixing, so I became the official mixer for most of the school performances.
Mr. Ford knew the owner of a PA rental shop on Wilson Ave. and he managed to get me a part time job working there after school rewinding voice coils on speakers and fixing equipment.
My father blew up at Mr. Ford on more than one occasion. Once was when Mr. Ford called my father to suggest that my father buy me a keyboard. The second time was when my Mr. Ford called my father to suggest that my father buy me an Apple Mac or and Apple IIc so that I could get into MIDI sequencing. The third time my father blew up at Mr. Ford was when one of Mr. Ford’s other students had to give a recital at the North York Board of Education auditorium. She was going to play the piano in real time and I programmed the accompaniment tracks to accompany her on the piano. My father at the time was working out of an office in the Federal Government building at 4900 Yonge Street. This was literally 2 blocks away from where the recital was going on. Mr. Ford suggested that I call my father and see if my father wanted to come and attend the recital. I told Mr. Ford that I was afraid to. Mr. Ford asked me for my father’s work number. Mr. Ford then called my father. My father blew up at him for disturbing him at work and for taking me off school property without checking with him first.
I put together a 5mw Helium Neon laser for science class. My science teacher, Mr. Jonathan Bowles of course was very impressed. Not only with the laser itself, but with the description of how a laser works, and the fact that I had interfaced the laser with a video game call VECTREX and could use the laser to play X-Y graphics on any large surface. Mr. Bowles was certain this could get me into the National Science Fair in Ottawa. He called my father. My father blew up.
When I got home from school that day I got a lecture from Richard about how he was sick and goddamned tired of my school teachers calling him up and harassing him with stupid bullshit. He told me that I was to stop showing off in school, that I was to go to school, shut my damn mouth, stare at the chalk board, and only speak if I am spoken to.
The only high grades I had that year were of course music and science. All of my other grades were just barely a pass.
That summer my father asked me what my plans were for the new school year. Was I going to go to grade 9 or was I going to go get a job. If I didn’t go back to school in September, I had to get a job and I was also going to start paying him $200.00 a month for the rent of my bedroom in the basement.
Richard had joined the Royal Canadian Navy with a grade 8 / grade 9 education in 1963 that he obtained in a single room school house in Fort McMurray, AB. So I guess that his way of thinking was that I could simply leave school and luck into employment that would look after me for life, just like the Canadian Forces had looked after him. But this was the summer of 1987, not 1963. Grade 8 wasn’t going to get you anywhere.
Richard made an offer. He said that if I did go back to school in September that he would sign me up for driver training with Young Drivers of Canada on my birthday in September when I turned 16. That turned out to be another of Richard’s many lies.
I did return to school that September.
On the day of my birthday in September after school I went to the DMV and picked up the paperwork for my learner’s permit. I then went to the Young Driver’s office on Wilson Ave and picked up the enrolment paperwork. I then went home and waited for Richard to come home. I gave Richard the paperwork. He looked at it and asked me what this was for. I said that you had promised that you’d let me get my learner’s permit and the Young Driver’s course. He said that I misunderstood him, that he said that he’d check with his insurance company first to see if my driver’s licence would affect his rates. He said that he wanted to let me get my learner’s permit, but that his insurance company said that his rates would go up if he did that. And this was supposedly true even if I didn’t drive his car. Again, another “Richard Lie(tm)”.
I left school not too long after this. I started working full time. And by early 1988 I moved out.
I lived on my own until the summer of 1989 when I bumped into Mr. Bowles. He implored me to go back to school and finish school. He said that my brain was too big to waste on menial labour. He suggested that I could attend A.I.S.P. over at Avondale and that it would be perfect for someone like me who didn’t fit into regular school too well and didn’t have much in the way of support at home.
I got word from Mr. Bowles that he along with Mr. Ford and Mr. Aitken had written letters on my behalf to the administrators of A.I.S.P.. A couple of weeks later I received word that I had been accepted into the program. I went over an met the staff at A.I.S.P. and we formulated a plan. I would take grade 9 and grade 10 in the first year, and then I would take grade 11 and grade 12 in the second year.
A.I.S.P. stood for “The Alternative and Independent Study Program”. It occupied the second floor of an elementary school. It also had an enrolment of close to 300 students. You couldn’t get 300 students on the second floor of this school if you tried. You’d basically go to this school and receive your assignments. Then you were expected to hand your assignments in by the dead line. There really weren’t classrooms to speak of, but you were more than welcome to sit in on lessons. You could also drop into local high schools and attend classes there if you wanted to. The school didn’t have a library. If you needed books you either went to the North York Public Library or you dropped into a local high school and borrowed books from there.
The only problem with Avondale is that I wouldn’t be able to work while going there. And any part-time job I got wouldn’t cover the rent of where I was living. So I went back home and talked to Richard. Richard agreed to let me move back in. I could sleep on the couch in the basement as my former bedroom in the basement had been converted to a new TV room. Richard would also arrange to drive me to his office in the morning and I could walk the remainder of the distance to school. When I got off school I could go wait in the lobby of 4900 Yonge street for a drive back home, but if I missed the drive I’d have to walk home as he was not going to waste his time waiting. Young and Sheppard to Keele and Sheppard isn’s a small distance.
Everything was going fine for the first few months. That was until Richard found me and a group of other kids from A.I.S.P. walking on Yonge towards the North York Public library. As he would always do in his Mustang, he jumped on the brakes, spun the steering wheel, hit the accelerator and dumped the clutch and did a piss poor burnout / half donut across Yonge Street to where I was standing dumbfounded with my classmates. He jumped out of the car and started yelling about not putting up with my bullshit and lies, that he was sick and tired of me not attending school. One of the other kids chimed in that we were in school, that we were going to the library to grab some books. Richard ranted that the fucking school had fucking books and what type of fucking school didn’t have goddamn books.
Richard obviously didn’t comprehend the meaning of “Independent Study” too well.
When I got home that evening after walking from Avondale back to the base it was as pleasant as you could imagine it to be. “You get your fucking ass into a regular school tomorrow or you get the fuck out of my house!”. Again I tried to explain to him what A.I.S.P. was and that I was taking four years of school in two school years and that’s why I couldn’t do this at a regular school. “I don’t fucking understand what the fuck is wrong with you? Why can’t you just be fucking normal? Just take some fucking basket weaving courses and pass the grade, that’s all you have to do”. I quit school again for the last time. I happened into a decent job that was a sixth month contract that had me travelling through the Maritimes. So I satisfied Richard’s demand of moving out of his house.
I got flown home halfway through the job for a two week vacation. I stayed at a local hotel until it was time to fly back. At the end of the contract I had close to $25k in the bank.
I was starting to look for apartments down around the Queen and Spadina area of Toronto. I was kinda hoping to get a job with Active Surplus, or one of the other electronics shops down on Queen.
Somehow I let slip to Richard how much money I had in the bank. He started reminding me how expensive it was for him to raise my brother and I and that I should pay him back for the concert ticket that he had bought for my birthday.
I got a phone call from him one day around the middle of June. He was getting his final posting back to Alberta. He wanted me to move with him so that “we could try to be a family again”. Was I ever stupid. We had never been a family to begin with, so there was no family to “be again”. And no, things didn’t work out any better this time around. If I was a gambling man, I would wager that Richard had told my stepmother that I was going to be going back to school. And no, there was no plan for me to go back to school. Being 19 in grade 9 isn’t a good thing.
In the end I did end up obtaining my grade 12 G.E.D. which is ironic considering that the G.E.D. was created after WWII to allow returning soldiers to finish their education that may have been interrupted when they enlisted to fight in the war.
I knew nothing of the G.E.D. program until I met my mother in 1990. In the summer of 1991 she discovered that I only had my formal grade 8. She found out where to pick up the G.E.D. application and the study materials. So one day after work I went down and picked them up. The next writing session was in about a month. The intake worker said that I could wait for the next session in 6 months. I applied for the session in a month.
Studying wasn’t hard. After all, I didn’t leave school because I found school to be hard. I left school because home life was an absolute unmitigated nightmare.
When you write the G.E.D. you are given a randomized assortment of questions that grade 12 students are required to pass to obtain their final marks. I forget how many question were on the G.E.D.. If I remember correctly is was about 50 questions per subject. The subjects were “Writing Skills”; “Social Studies”; “Science”; “Interpreting Literature and the Arts”; and “Mathematics”.
This is how I did:
An “A”, three “B’s”, and one “C”. Not too shabby for someone like me with only one month to study. So yeah, school obviously wasn’t the problem. It was my home life that was the problem.
The calculation method for the G.E.D. has changed over the years, but back in 1991 it was known as 40 – 45
40 is the lowest possible score you could have in any of the five sections or an average score of 45 on all five subjects. Some questions are worth a point, some questions are worth half-a-point, and some questions are worth more points.
You are being graded against all grade 12 students in the jurisdiction that you take the G.E.D. and your scores are supposed to reflect upon how many graduating students had similar marks to your marks.
Is a G.E.D. the same as a high school diploma? Nope. But in the real world almost all employers, colleges, technical schools will accept a G.E.D. at face value. Some technical schools will require that you undertake a test prior to enrolling in their program that shows that you understand the mathematics at the proper level. I had to do this when I took my power engineering courses. Most universities will also accept the G.E.D. but like technical school, will require some form of additional testing to show that you are competent in the basic areas required for the program.
As far as I know, Richard never completed his grade 12. Yes, he did take some math upgrading courses in Toronto, but I don’t think he ever finished grade 12 or even challenged the G.E.D.
And that folks is my academic experience.
I used to beat myself up a lot when I was younger for not having gone to trade school, or college, or even university. But even if I had done well in school I don’t think those options would have really ever been open to me.
Richard had parlayed his grade 8 education into a 30 year career with the Royal Canadian Navy and the Canadian Armed Forces which saw him travel around the world and visit many ports of call. He flew all over the place with the airforce as was evidenced by his being in Iceland on the day I was admitted to hospital after a bicycle accident in Summerside.
To him, school was nothing more that what he had attended back in the ’50s in Fort McMurray, Alberta. A single room school house. Definitely no computers. Definitely no music programs. Definitely no computer labs. His school was obviously just paying attention to what was written on the blackboard and nothing more.
Why would I need trade school, or college, or university?
The Canadian Armed Forces had taught him mechanical skills, electrical skills, avionics, and had even sent him to Boeing/VERTOL to be trained in the Maintenance Management for the CH-147 Chinook. If the Canadian Forces did this for him, surely they would do the same for me, right.
By the late ’80s grade 8 was no longer sufficient to get into the Canadian Forces. Grade 8 wasn’t sufficient to get into anything really. And by the late ’80s employers were no longer training employees. Employees were expected to show up for the first day of work with degrees and diplomas and 50 years of on the job experience.
Sure was a bitter pill to swallow. But at least I know that I played the cards that were dealt to me to the best of my ability.
After returning back to work I found that the benefits of 10 mg were wearing off around noon. Yes, work is stressful and demanding, so that was probably what started to nullify the effect of the 10 mg.
Being on Escitalopram is different. I’ve honestly never felt like this before in my life.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’ve been given a 2nd chance at life, or have been allowed to start my life over from some arbitrary starting line.
The Escitalopram hasn’t fixed anything. It hasn’t made me “happy”. What it has done is raised the floor to which my depression would drag me down to. I do get somewhat depressed still, but it’s nowhere near as deep as my depressions used to go. I’ve had this untreated depression for far too long. There are also far too many factors that contributed to this depression. I now believe that I was predisposed to depression from my father’s side of the family. Depression can run in families.
The anxiety, which has been a constant companion of mine since the late ’70s had been toned down substantially. I haven’t woken up grinding my teeth once in the last couple of months.
I find that I can concentrate better now and when something disturbs me while I’m in the middle of a thought, it doesn’t completely derail my train of thought.
The dark thoughts are still there, and they always will be. You can’t go through what I’ve gone through and not carry those demons around.
Captain McRae, Captain Totzke, Mcpl Gill, P.S., Earl Ray Stevens. They’re all still up there too. But at least now I can more or less ignore them for the time being.
Even though the Escitalopram has calmed the waves of my emotions the war still rages on behind my eyes. The time for fixing these issues was back in the early ’80s. Not 40+ years later.
But, we’ll have to see how things work out. I’m 50 now. The average life expectancy for a male in Canada now sits at 80 years, so that’s about 30. Most of the men in my family have dropped dead early though, so I’d say that I might have a life expectancy of 70 years. But there are still other factors at play. So let’s just agree that I’m not getting a second chance. I’m just getting a bit of a respite in the final 1/4 of my life.
I grew up dabbling in car, computers, and electronics. I sure wasted a lot of my life doing that.
Richard wasn’t the type of father to do things with his kids. I don’t ever remember going to any type of event with him as a kid.
That’s one thing that social services mentioned in their paperwork when they became involved with my family in November of 1981. “There’s not one single activity these people seem to have in common”.
Never went to a hockey game with him.
Never went to a football game with him.
Never went to a baseball game with him.
He never came to a school performance or recital.
Never came to a cadet night.
Never went to the Ontario Science Centre with us.
Never went to the CN Tower with us.
No matter how many times he dropped us off at Canada’s Wonderland, he’d never come in with us. And no, my brother and I had no choice with Canada’s Wonderland. As my brother said, Canada’s Wonderland was Richard’s “discount babysitting service”. Seasons passes were $29.95 for the ’83 – ’84 season. He’d give us ten bucks each and drop us off at 9 a.m. and pick us up at 10 p.m..
Never went shopping with him at Active Surplus or College Electronics or any of the other electronics shops that we both used to buy supplies from.
I actually went to more football games with my grandmother when she’d score Edmonton Elks tickets (formerly the Edmonton Eskimos) for underprivileged families from the Bissell centre.
And it wasn’t just outside activities that Richard wouldn’t partake in.
Acknowledgement of birthdays was pretty well non-existent. I had one birthday that he acknowledged that I can remember. That was my 14th birthday in Sept of 1985. As I would discover later in life, the only reason for this acknowledgement is my family was under supervision of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and Richard was obviously buttering me up just in case the Toronto Police Service notified Children’s Aid about the massive domestic fight between my father and step mother in the summer on 1985.
Christmas, as my brother refers to it as, was “socks and underwear day”.
Richard didn’t like Father’s Day cards made at school, Richard didn’t mark his birthday. I didn’t actually learn Richard’s birthday until 2005 when I had to get my birth certificate replaced.
I tried to pick up electronics as a kid. I guess that my way of thinking was that if Richard and I had something in common that he’d love me or something. Didn’t work.
The same thing with computers. I never really had an interest in computers.
Electronics was something that I picked up, especially digital electronics and digital logic. But I had absolutely no interest in it. And I learnt quickly not to ask Richard for help with math related to electronics as this would cause him to blow his lid. Again, I would learn much later in life that his formal education was grade 8 with an upgrade to grade 9 to get into the Royal Canadian Navy. When we moved to Toronto he started taking mathematics upgrading courses at York University and Seneca College. These upgrades were more in keeping with the more “administerial” roles he was taking in the Canadian Forces.
Almost all of the electronics that I learnt as a kid came from magazines like “Popular Electronics”, “Radio Electronics “, “Elektor Electronics”. Even before I started servicing video games, I always had after school or weekend employment.
Computers were much the same thing. Richard would spend literal hours programming his computers. I could pick up programming from the magazines that I’d buy at the magazine store, but not once ever did Richard ever sit down with me and teach me how to program.
Richard had a knack of buying stuff that was on sale or had been discontinued. I could participate in computer lab at school, but the machine I had used a version of BASIC that was just modified enough that it wouldn’t work flawlessly with the lessons in computer lab. Almost all of the kids in computer club at school had Apple IIe or Commodore 64 computers. I had a TRS-80 Color Computer. And no, the other kids didn’t come from rich or affluent families. Elia Junior High and even Pierre Laporte Jr. High were in very working class neighbourhoods. These were families that really didn’t have the money to waste on novelties.
Most parents as I’ve learnt in my life put their kids above anything else. Not Richard. Richard is all that mattered in Richard’s life. My brother and I were Marie’s problem. He kept us because it was cheaper than giving us to our mother. One of Richard’s Air Force buddies once asked Richard why Richard did’t give my brother and I back to our mother if we were causing Richard so much trouble. Richard’s response was that as long and my brother and I lived with Richard, Richard could control the costs but that if Richard gave us back to our mother that he’d have to sign his paycheque over to “that bitch”, and that was not going to happen.
Around the time when I was 14, I started repairing arcade video games. Even though I didn’t have a passion for electronics, none the less I could do it. And I was good at it. I repaired CPU boards that guys with technical diplomas from DeVry couldn’t service. Having employment meant that I had money. And having money meant that I didn’t have to live on the non-existent allowance that Richard never offered.
Around the summer of 1986 I bought a 1978 Volkswagen Rabbit for $175. The car was a rust bucket piece of crap. The floor pans were rotted out. The rocker panels and the rear wheel arches were rotted out. This car would have never passed a safety inspection. But that was fine. I just wanted a car so that I could get a membership at the base auto hobby club. My thinking was that I could get Richard to teach me how to work on cars and we could spend time together. That didn’t work out quite the way I planned for it to. I learnt how to work on cars from Bill Parker, Bob Wrightson, Bob, Stephan, and a couple of the other service members at the club.
It’s obvious now looking back that Richard was far too damaged to be a functional parent.
Was it the fact that his father left him as a young kid?
Was it the fact that his mother was emotionally damaged from Residential School?
Grandma had a fierce temper and she was not above using physical force. Did she beat on Richard when Richard was a kid?
Did Richard’s misogynistic views of women come from his dependence/defiance relationship with his mother?
I barely play around with electronics anymore. I never really had an interest in it.
I stepped away from electronics around 1989 when I asked one of the employers I was servicing video games for if I could have a pay raise. His response was that as good as I was at electronics, and sure I could fix equipment that others had given up on, I didn’t have a degree or a certificate from any college or institution and therefore he couldn’t pay me more than what I was making. It was this that prompted me to quit working and to try going back to school.
The last time I programmed a computer was back in 1989 when I was enrolled in the Alternative and Independent Study Program in North York trying to finish off my grade 9 and 10 in the first year and grade 11 and 12 in the second. I took Fortran, Cobol, and Autocad 10.
I haven’t touched BASIC, Fortran, Cobol or any other computer language since.
Cars? The last time I owned a car was 1998. I don’t mention to anyone that as a kid I used to do brake jobs, clutch jobs, and electrical troubleshooting as I really don’t like cars. I can barely be bothered to do my own oil on my motorcycle.
I just don’t have the interest electronics, computers, or cars.
In 2006 I took up figure skating. That was a blast. Now that’s an activity that I wished I could have done as a kid. But I also have to realize that there was no way on earth that Richard was going to allow his son to skate like a girl.
When I was in Sea Cadets, I loved sailing. I knew of a sailing club on Centre Island in Toronto that specialized in sailing programs for kids from low income families. There were a lot of kids from the different Greater Toronto sea cadet corps in this club. Richard refused to cough up the menial fees that George was charging.
Learning to fly would have been cool. And yes, my father had his private pilot’s licence. Although he only ever took me up in the air once. You don’t have to own a plane to go flying. Most small charter companies will rent small planes to licence pilots. Especially to members of the Canadian Armed Forces with their pilots licence.
After I had left sea cadets at the Dennison Armouries in the spring of 1987, I joined air cadets at the Moss Park Armouries. All Richard had to do was sign the permission slip to allow me to take gliding instruction and pay the minimal fees for glider access, and I could have started on my pilot’s licence. Nope.
I had to wait until I moved out of the house in early 1988 before I could get my driver’s licence. Richard had promised me that he would sign me up for “Young Drivers of Canada”. Nope. Another false promise.
So, I’ll never know what it was with Richard and what it was that made him a defective father. Why he’d promise so many things and yet only deliver on disappointment.
Growing up with Richard, it was to the point that if I really wanted something as a kid, I usually wouldn’t get it. So I took that and turned it around to the point that if I wanted something, I would hope really hard that I wouldn’t get it. So that way, when I didn’t get it I wouldn’t be disappointed. Twisted? Yep. But it was a coping strategy.
Allowances were another constant let down with Richard. He’d promise you $5 or $10 if you did this or that. But when you did this or that, there was always some excuse as to why you didn’t earn the $5 or $10.
All I know is that looking back on things, I sure did waste a significant portion of my life trying to connect with a person who didn’t want any type of connection.
And maybe it’s that rejection of any type of connection that causes me to be isolated from others to this day.
When I went up to Morinville, Alberta in 2003 to see my father, my stepmother said to me that I should try to see my father more often. But the thing is, Richard didn’t want to be seen more often. When I became a 5th class Power Engineer in 2004, he didn’t care. When I became a 4th class Power Engineer in 2005. He still didn’t care. When I landed a power engineering position in the hospital where I currently work, still didn’t care.
Even when I got my grade 12 back in 1991 he just didn’t care.
So, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
He just couldn’t be bothered.
And I was the idiot for having looked up to him as a kid.
So yeah, it was a lonely and isolated childhood. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed single to this day. It’s not for a lack of trying. It’s just that being alone is all I’m used to.
I don’t think I’ll ever figure this out because I don’t think this confusion was solely mine to begin with. It was kinda a group thing if you know what I mean.
Going by the number of sexual encounters I’ve had with women, I’ve had maybe 3 female partners, you’d assume that I have very little interest in women.
Going by the number of men I’ve had sex with in my life ( not including the sexual abuse), I’ve probably had about two to three dozen partners in my life, you’d assume that I’m homosexual.
Yet, every time I get intimate with a man, Captain Totzke pops into my head and starts admonishing me about my mental illness called homosexuality and that if I didn’t like the abuse on CFB Namao then I wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long. And then there’s my father whom also pops into my head and starts reminding me that I allowed the babysitter abuse my younger brother.
And of course, just growing up on military bases in the ’70s and ’80s would turn any queer child into a self loathing human.
And let’s be honest. I’m 50. I’ve really only had two long term “partners” in my life, and I’ve never really had any interest in a partner. This in itself probably stems from the way my father viewed his relationships and how little joy or pleasure he seemed to get from them. He was forever complaining how much his relationships were costing him in time and money and how much he had to do for the other party, so maybe that had an effect on why I’ve remained single my entire life.
My depression and anxiety couldn’t have helped much either.
Was it the sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao? What I endured and what I saw happen from 1978 until 1980 have more than likely affected me for life.
Was it my involvement with the military social worker Captain Terry Totzke, who for nearly three years had drilled into my head that I was showing “homosexual tendencies” due to what had happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao?
Was it my father’s reactions, which were in no doubt guided by Captain Totzke and the military’s view of “homosexual activities”?
Was it the sexual abuse on CFB Griesbach?
I have no doubt the sexual abuse prior to my 13th birthday probably helped to form my opinion on sex. I didn’t have my first orgasm until after I had turned 13. So sexually pleasuring those abusing me was a one-way street.
Was it the sexual abuse on CFB Downsview at the hands of Earl Ray Stevens? Earl knew that I was a military dependent. As he was a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces he also would have known that I would have been in a deep trouble if anyone in the Canadian Forces, whether it be the military police or even my father, found out that I was having sex with men.
Was it the sexual encounters I had with the much older teen in the summer of 1985 when I spent the summer with my grandmother?
It’s really hard to say.
But I would say that these events obviously have had some effect.
Looking back I’m pretty sure that being loner and on my own set me up for a lot of the abuse. And with what I’d gone through on CFB Namao, and the counselling that I endured from Captain Totzke meant that I pretty well thought that being abused was something that I was something that I was to be blamed for.
And when you’re not getting any type of love and affection at home, when somebody sexually abuses you, at least they’re paying attention to you, right?
In my life I’ve had boyfriends.
In my life I’ve had girlfriends.
My first boyfriend was on CFB Griesbach of all places. The place where Captain Totzke had warned me about homosexuality being a mental illness. The same place where Captain Totzke said he had the military police watching me.
He was a boy my age. He lived two houses down from mine. His father was a sergeant in the Canadian Airborne Regiment. It was nothing serious, and nothing sexual. We liked to kiss. And hang out together a lot. His father caught us kissing once. My father nearly killed me. Said that he never wanted to hear again, especially not from a sergeant, that I had been kissing their son and that if he did that he’d “break my fucking neck”.
Megan wasn’t really a girlfriend. We did like to talk and hang out a lot. And there was the clothes swapping thing. Definitely nothing romantic.
In the aftermath of Earl Stevens I started to believe that I was gay. Earl had impressed upon me that men will pay for sex and that sex was always supposed to be meaningless except for the person paying.
I frequently got beat up bad in grade 8 for being a “queerboy” and a “faggot”.
I had a boyfriend in the late ’90s. It didn’t really last too long.
I wouldn’t have sex with a woman until 2002 when I had a relationship with a woman. We met at the local motorcycle hangout. Not a biker club or anything like that. It was the local Starbucks where all the weekend motorcyclists would hang out after the rides. We both had our reasons for liking each other. Mine was primarily so that I could get people to stop wondering if I was a fag or a queer. Her’s was that she wanted to have kids.
I have absolutely no interest in having kids or raising kids. She did. And even at the start of the relationship when I wanted separate beds, she wanted the beds together.
I guess my primary reason for getting together with her is that I thought that it would get a bully manager off my back at work. He kept referring to me as “Freddie” or “Liberace”. He kept telling me that if I didn’t do things the way he wanted that he’d out me to the board of directors.
In 2003 I took her up to meet my father. He wasn’t buying it, and neither was my stepmother.
Even when I got mugged in July of 1995, the attending VPD officer was adamant that I was a homosexual and that I had been beat up in a “trick gone bad”. Even when I was able to produce proof that I had been where I said I had been and that the man and woman who mugged me had followed me from where I said they did the responding officer, a VPD Constable, wasn’t listening. I was a male prostitute as far as he was concerned and until I admitted such the investigation was going nowhere.
Another thing that may have hindered my ability to form relationships is I really hate being touched. This was something that was noted in the aftermath of CFB Namao. And it’s something that persists to this day. I don’t like holding hands. I don’t like being touched. The wrong touch in the wrong place can upset me and turn me off like a light switch. Even at work I don’t like being patted on the shoulder.
I guess there’s something about a person’s mannerisms that marks them as “not straight”.
What it is, I’ll never know.
Is it the way I talk?
Is it the way I walk?
And if I am in fact gay / queer / homosexual why don’t I enjoy homosexual relationships?
Did Captain Terry Totzke and his desire to cure me of my apparent homosexuality set me up for life to be a self-loathing homosexual?
Was it the sexual abuse in my youth that taught me that sex in just a base act that one does to pleasure another person otherwise you’d get in trouble?
Did growing up in my father’s household teach me that intimate relationships are not worth the effort?
Another issue that could be at play is the complete lack of the ability to form emotional bonds. In my household, relationships were of a calculated nature.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to come up with an answer for this.
Growing up in a military family living on Canadian Armed Forces bases, I had always been exposed to tattoos. And as a kid, I had always wanted tattoos. But one thing I found is that outside of the military, tattoos weren’t really generally accepted. And with my almost nonexistent self esteem I was almost 25 before I got my first tattoo.
Being in a very precarious state with my employment and my finances at that stage in my life meant that I wasn’t going to risk losing my employment due to a disagreement with my employer over the appropriateness of tattoos in the work place. So the tattoos I had prior to working at the hospital were always small and could be covered up with a shirt.
After I started working at the hospital things became easier. Tattoos were not forbidden and some of the doctors and surgeons had some pretty good ink.
When I got my name change completed in 2008 I decided that I was no longer going to worry about what Richard would think. I started to get visible ink.
I’m not an artistic person. Faces and characters really don’t speak to me.
So I stated off with small designs and some small phrases.
Then the CFB Namao matter happened.
That matter literally sucked the life right out of me and it really slowed down what I wanted to do. After all, how can you know what you want to do when everything that you’ve known up to that date had been an absolute lie or bullshit.
Well, now that the entire truth has pretty well been discovered, I’ve made it my goal to have my complete body covered with as much ink as possible. And I’ve decided that I’m going to go with something simple but bold.
Stripes and bands.
Stripes and bands
Nothing complex. Nothing graphic. Just simple stripes and bands. To get that one section of my leg done was about 6 hours. I’m going back in a few weeks to get the other lower leg done. After that it will be both upper legs. Then my mid section.
And my arms. Definitely will be keep the swords on my upper arms, but I’ll either continue with the bands or I will simply black out my forearms.
My face is a different story. I’ll stay with the lines, but I am going to thicken up most of the lines. Maybe add some line art.
Tattooing, like piercing, has actually worked out to be a form of pain relief. It is true, there is an adrenaline rush of sorts when you’re getting tattooed or pierced. And the thing about the adrenaline rush is it works as a sort of natural antidepressant.
Are there any tattoos that I regret? Nope.
And no, I do not regret tattooing my face. I love it.
Facial tattoos are really frowned upon in our society, but as I’m kinda one of society’s misfits, I guess I don’t have to worry.
It took so long to find an artist that was willing to tattoos my face. Not too many artists are willing to tattoo anyone’s face. But I found an artist who was willing. Yes, it was odd sitting there in the chair with the tattoo gun pressing into my face. When the tattooing stopped and it was time to take a look, I was blown away. I had never felt this pleased with myself before.
It took a while at first to get used to people staring. But I guess that comes with the territory. And no, I’m not offended if anyone looks, you can’t tattoo your face and then act all upset when people look.
The vast majority of people either don’t care or they like what they see. I’ve only encountered a very limited number of people who were upset.
No. My neck tattoos and my face tattoos are not Māori. Nor are they intended to be. My neck piece is actually a vector pattern that I bought from Shutterstock. The vector pattern on my head also came from Shutterstock. The lines on my face actually started off as me wanting to fill up the void on my chin. Things just spread out from there.
Cultural appropriation?
I don’t think so. I’ve done some research and I’ve tried to stay far away from any patterns or designs that could be assumed to belong to a tribe or peoples.
But didn’t “white people” steal tattooing from the Polynesians.
Not quite.
Historians and archaeologists are finding evidence that tattooing was actually a common thing amongst the peoples of continental and Northern Europe. And this makes a lot of sense. Everyone in the world has a common ancestor and to say that only specific peoples felt the need and urge to decorate their bodies would be foolhardy.
Recently a 2,500 year old “Siberian Princess” that had been unearthed in the early 2000’s was discovered to have had intricate tattoos. And as more corpses from much earlier days across Europe and North Europe are unearthed, tattoos are being found.
So, what happened?
Religion, or more specifically the Abrahamic religions including Christianity. As Christianity spread throughout Europe it erased customs and traditions. St. Patrick didn’t drive the snakes from Ireland. St. Patrick drove the Pagans from Ireland. And Christianity drove the Picts from Scotland. The Britons suffered the same fate. There are entire write-ups on how Christianity literally erased and replaced cultures and civilizations as it spread.
As the Church had a stranglehold on what parts of history were recorded and what parts of history were discarded, facts that didn’t suit the “man created in the image of god” mindset were pushed aside and forgotten about. So it goes without saying that a lot of European cultures that didn’t fit into the ideals of the new Christian theocracy were simply erased and forgotten about.
In Canada, we had the Government of British North America, and the the Government of Canada work in conjunction with the Catholic Church to erase the cultures of the various First Nations people. And this was in the modern ear. This was still going on into the 1990s. So to say that the Catholic church in previous eras erased peoples and cultures isn’t outlandish at all.
It’s no wonder there aren’t any historical records of alternate genders or alternate sexualities from the start of the Christian period to the modern era. Christianity has always had a weird and unhealthy fixation on sexuality and “earthly pleasures”. Suffering and virtue is the goal. Any sexuality or gender identity that didn’t result in reproduction was seen as “unholy”, and had to go.
When Christianity spread around the world, it did so at the end of a sword.
I’m not religious in any sense of the word. My body was not created in the image of a god. My parents were horny and they had sex without birth control. And therefore I’ll poke as many holes in it and decorate and colour the skin of my corpse as I see fit. If you don’t like tattoos and you don’t like piercings, don’t get them.
To those of you that have known me prior to May of 2008, you may have known me under a different name.
In August of 2006 I had a very detailed and pointed conversation with my father relating to the events of CFB Namao and his parenting skills and abilities. These conversations continued on for about a month until Richard got bored.
It was then that I realized that there was never going to be a “father – son” relationship between the two of us. His ideals of family norms seem to have been shaped by television and popular media. Not the slightest were his ideas based in reality. This may have been a side effect of his having been in the Canadian Armed Forces since his 17th birthday and not having any idea of what the real world function like. The chain of command told him all he needed to know. His station was not to question.
I decided that seeing as how my past was acting like such an anchor I’d do something that I had always wanted to do.
Change my name.
It’s actually not a hard process to undertake, but there is a process none the less.
First, you have to choose your name and how much of your name you want to change.
I changed my entire name.
First name, middle name, and last name.
The first name was easy. I never really like the name “Robert”. As a kid friends of the family had always called me Robbie or Bobby. Both names had an appeal to me. Bobbie even more so than Robbie. Robbie was still too close to “Robert” for my liking. Bobby I didn’t like as it was too “male”. However, I did like “Bobbie”.
Bobbie is an interesting name. Bobby is the masculine spelling. Bobbi is the feminine spelling. And Bobbie is the unisex spelling. Throughout the last 100 years according to the various censuses, Bobbie has gone between being a dominant male baby name to being a dominant female baby name. The unisex aspect of it appealed to me as I’ve never really identified as either male or female.
It took a while to decide on my last name. It wasn’t until I was working as a canvaser for the 2008 City of Vancouver Municipal Election that I came across my last name. I had decided when I wanted to change my name that I wanted my last name to complement my first name. As I was making my way though a voters list I came across someone with the last name of “Bees”. I did a bit of research on the Internet. Turns out the surname Bees has quite a long history behind it.
I also liked the name “Bobbie Bees” because it actually has a lot of “B’s” in it.
So, please with my new name I decided to head off to the Vital Statistics office to initiate the process. This was basically collecting all of the paperwork required and then filling out the paperwork.
“Bobbie Bees” was almost my new name until I was ready to submit my paperwork. When I took the paperwork in, the worker at the counter asked me if I really only wanted a surname and a family name without a middle name. I hadn’t really planned on having a middle name as I’d never really used my previous middle name. The worker suggested that I should pick a new middle name as this would give me an alternative name that I could use depending on the situation. The worker suggested that I choose my birthstone as my new middle name.
My birthstone is sapphire.
The worker agreed with me that “Bobbie Sapphire” and “Sapphire Bees” both sounded like stripper names.
In the list of birthstones I happened to spy “Garnet”.
I checked the definition of “garnet” in the dictionary. It was a red coloured gemstone known for its abrasive qualities.
And Garnet was also the name of one of my favourite characters from Final Fantasy IX. So Garnet it was.
Now that my new name was chosen, it was time to finalize the paperwork and pay the fees. I also had to attend the fingerprinting section of RCMP “E” division headquarters to get my finger prints checked.
I couple of weeks later I received a letter from the RCMP notifying Vital Statistics in both BC and Nova Scotia that I had passed the records check and that there was no reason to deny me the name change request.
The next letter I received from from Nova Scotia congratulating me on the name change and letting me know how to request new birth certificates and how to properly destroy my old certificates.
All my other ID had to be updated as well.
At this point in time I’m of the opinion that people should have “childhood” names and “adult” names. Childhood names are often picked by people who don’t have any idea of what their child would like to be named and they pick the names based upon reasons that may mean nothing to the child. When a child turns 16, they should be encouraged to pick a new name that suits them, that suits their identity, and fits with their idea of the world that surrounds them.
There were some unintended consequences of my name change.
In 2008, I hadn’t spoken to my mother since February of 1992 when I moved to Vancouver, BC. When I legally changed my name, my “dead name” ceased to exist. The only place my “dead name” exists is within law enforcement. Even today, I am not allowed to use my “dead name” for any legal purpose.
My mother would have turned 65 in 2011. So she would have been eligible to collect her CPP. For some reason she had to be able to prove to CPP how many dependent children she had had. She requested my brothers birth certificate from the Nova Scotia government. But when she tried to obtain mine, the Nova Scotia government told her that my birth certificate was restricted and that she could not have a copy.
When I tracked my mother down in late 2013 to ask her about some of the answers my father had given me in a Federal Court of Canada matter she said that she was surprised to hear from me. She explained that when the Nova Scotia government wouldn’t give her a copy of my birth certificate she had assumed that I was dead.
She didn’t really seem to care that I was still alive. But I think at that point in her life she was just too broken down and defeated to care.
I’ve been Bobbie Bees for over 12 years at this point in my life. I wasn’t able to kill off Robert like I had hoped I would have been to. “Robert” lives on due to the trauma , neglect, and abuse he was subjected to. “Robert” and the people that harmed him will be with me until the day I die.
But at least Bobbie Garnet Bees allows me a respite from “Robert”.
So, I’ve been on escitalopram for about 2-1/2 months now.
It’s been interesting.
It hasn’t fixed anything. And I doubt that it will.
It just seems to have introduced a cease fire in the never ending war behind my eyes.
It’s a weird kind of emotional numbing.
Right now I’m on 10mg, but this might have to increase due to the stress of work.
The main participants in this war war P.S., Captain McRae, Terry (Captain Terry Totzke), Richard Gill, Margret Anderson (my grandmother), the unidentified man from the sauna, Earl Stevens, Allen M. There are others, but they were mostly bit players dragged into this war by others.
The escitalopram can’t erase the memories. What it does seem to do is limit my reaction to the memories. But the memories are still there.
I was set to see a psychologist in November, but they wouldn’t be able to offer anything in the way of a diagnosis. Only advice on thinking happy thoughts.
I’ve tried counselling before. I attended a counsellor that specialized in sexually abused males. However, my issues are far greater than the sexual abuse I endured in my youth. It was suggested that I see a psychiatrist and discover which traumatic event or events it was that did the most damage and work form there. For that I’d need to see a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrists are not easy to get hold of. They’re not cheap. Most provincial medical plans will not cover them. And most private insurance plans will not cover them either.
But a good psychiatrist would be a good place to start from and to figure out where to go from here.
Well, another week down, another week just about to begin.
I wish that I had some clear idea of the direction that I want to go with this blog. Might come to me one day. I want to keep this blog separate from the topics that I discuss on by other blog, cfbnamao.ca but there probably will be some overlapping of the two.
I recently hit the 5,000 km mark on my bike.
Been out on a few weekend motorcycle trips this year. Not as many as last year though. The pandemic was nice in the sense that it cut down a massive amount of traffic on the highways and made the trips pleasant. Traffic levels are back to pre-pandemic levels and with that the amount of dangerous drivers on the highways has shot back up again negating the pleasant quietness of the open roads.
It’s raining again, finally.
It’s also cooling off. Now I have to wear my blouse tops with my dresses on most days going to work. I know, “the struggles of the modern man”.
Finally got both doses of Moderna, still no Wi-Fi of 5G reception. I’m beginning to think that a lot of these anti-vaxxers are full-o-shit.
One of the hardest things about writing this blog is that having grown up in a dysfunctional and emotionally stunted household, expressing myself is something that I find hard to do. I can talk technical talk, but anything involving emotions is still hard to do. But we’ll see if I can overcome those blockages or not.
I’m trying tp make use of my MacBook more often so that I can “capture” my thoughts as they come up. My previous style was to try to remember what I wanted to write down and then write when I had the chance. But that didn’t work as I was usually involved with something and so the fleeting thoughts were lost.
My two civil actions are proceeding at the moment. One is related to Earl Ray Stevens, and the other is a class action related to Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Father Angus McRae. Paperwork has been filed, documents have been exchanged, but both actions are in their infancy. Neither action is expected to get underway until next spring.
There is an election currently underway. And as much as I am hope that Dr. Hedy Fry and Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan lose their seats, I am greatly worried about the Conservatives winning. I can’t see the Conservatives risking upsetting their base by allowing M.A.i.D. for psychological issues such as depression. The Conservatives are more than likely to pass an amendment making it a legal requirement that depressed people attend bible study camp. Regardless I will be voting for Breen Ouellette, the NDP candidate for Vancouver Centre. There is absolutely no way that I could ever bring myself to vote for the Liberal Party of Canada and especially not Hedy Fry. Not after she made it very clear that child sexual abuse in the Canadian Armed Forces is something that she’s apparently willing to live with.
Beeshive 