Bobbie Bees – Page 47

You seem so normal……..

One of my curses if you will is that I seem “so normal”. Facial piercings and tattoos aside. This was especially truer back in my teens and twenties when I really had to appear “normal” in order to gain and keep employment.

I have never once in my life stuck a needle in my arm nor have I ever snorted anything up my nose. I don’t even like weed.

I can honestly remember the handful of times that I did drink. And not surprising these events often went way out of control. I honestly believe that alcoholism is genetic. My grandmother was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. And I more than like was destined to be an alcoholic.

Outside of the wine that I had been given in the rectory of the chapel on Canadian Forces Base Namao, and outside of the occasional sips of Baby Duck or my father’s rum & coke mixes, the first time I had alcohol as a kid was in the summer of 1984 when I was staying with my grandmother over the summer. Grandma and her friend Hazel were drinking. Grandma asked me to get her and Hazel another beer each out of the fridge. I took two beers out and popped the caps off. I sucked the foam off the top like I would always do when getting grandma a beer. This time though she told me to get her another beer out of the fridge, and this time I wasn’t to drink any of it. So I got her the beer, I popped the cap off, and I let the foam run down the side of the bottle. I put the bottle on the table in front of grandma. Grandma slid the other bottle over towards an empty chair and told me to sit down and drink my beer. This was cool I thought. I’m drinking beer with my grandmother. What twelve year old boy doesn’t want to hang out with his sixty-one-year-old grandmother and get drunk with her. I finished two bottles and then it was time for me to go pass out in the bedroom.

I didn’t drink again until I was about 15.
I know “drink again” isn’t something you want to hear somebody brag about when discussing their childhood, but in my household, the fact that I wasn’t a raging alcoholic by the time I was 18 was a miracle.

Bob Becker, a man that I was working for on the weekends at the time, had given me a small bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label to give to my father as a present. When I got home my father took one look at the bottle and said that he wouldn’t drink that horrid piss. Richard was a Lamb’s Navy and a Pilsner kind of guy. Anyways, Richard told me to put the bottle on a shelf in my bedroom and that he didn’t want to see me drink it until I was 19.

A friend from cadets happened to be over at my house for lunch one school day. We went downstairs to my bedroom. He spied the bottle. He saw my father’s shot glasses over by my father’s computer desk. Peter grabbed a pair of shot glasses and challenged me to drink more shots than he did before we returned to school. After about four shots each I grabbed the bottle from Peter’s hand and chugged it until it was empty. I don’t remember how long I stayed upright for. But I woke up the next day on the floor of my bedroom laying in a copious puddle of vomit.

My bedroom in the basement didn’t have a door. Richard said that military housing rules didn’t allow bedrooms in the basement and the military housing authority agreed that as long as there was no door on the bedroom that it wouldn’t be considered a bedroom. But I don’t think this was the housing rules were the true reason. My bedroom door was off for most of the time on CFB Griesbach, and the door was off for most of the time that I lived in the upstairs bedroom on CFB Downsview before giving my bedroom over to Sue’s son in early 1986.

Richard’s computer workstation where he played with his computers, sometimes until 02:30, had a view right into my bedroom. So there was absolutely no way that Richard didn’t see me laying on the floor with all that vomit and the bottle of Johnny Walker laying beside me.

All I got from Richard was a warning that he was going to start locking up his rum in his desk and that if his rum ever went missing that he was going to make sure that I knew there was a price to be paid.

The next time I had a drink of alcohol was in the spring of 1990 when I was on the road with Canshare Cabling. Michael and I had stopped at a hotel in Gagetown, New Brunswick. This was the first time that I had ever joined Michael for dinner. We had both stopped at the bank earlier in the day and I had pulled out about $300.00 for the week. Mike invited me to the bar at the hotel after. He encouraged me to keep up with him. I was 18 at the time but no one asked me for I.D. as I honestly looked like I was in my early 30s with my moustache and the grey hair that was peppered though my hair. I remember making it back to the hotel room that we were sharing. As soon as I laid down on the bed to room started spinning. No matter how tightly I gripped the mattress the room would just start spinning. And once it started spinning it wouldn’t stop. I spent the night going between the bed and the bathroom throwing up. I vowed to never drink again after that.

The next time I would ever go drinking was in August of 2005. I had just gotten my new job at St. Paul’s. And to reward me for the previous 5 years of employment, the Board of Directors with Equitable agreed to allow me to celebrate at the Lion’s Pub with some coworkers from Equitable and some other workers that I had previously worked with at a previous employer. We ran up a tab of about $3k for I think 8 people, most of it was for steaks and other foods. I’m also sure that other engineers from other buildings started showing up too. I didn’t get pissed drunk this time, but still I knew that something was wrong as the depression started to get out of control. I spent most of the evening crying to Harry about what had happened on CFB Namao. This was the first time that I had ever, and I mean ever, talked to anyone about this. This was supposed to be a happy day for me and it turned into a disaster.

I wouldn’t drink again until I took a short leave in 2010 from work to go to a job in Surrey. At my going away party a bunch of the boys from the plant took me out for drinks. I only had a glass or two. No problem this time.

On July 18th, 2011 I had gone downtown to pick up a MIDI cable for my new Yamaha keyboard that I had at the time. I figured that with the CFNIS finally going to hold P.S. responsible for what he had done all those years ago, I was going to start trying to learn some of the things my father had denied to me as punishment for my involvement with P.S.. I missed the Tom Lee store by about 20 minutes. On my way home I stopped at a bar. This was a bar that I had gone to a couple of times recently with the chief engineer and the steam fitter from work. They’d have beer and I’d drink Ice Tea. So, I was gonna grab an ice tea and maybe an order of fish and chips before heading home. As I was sitting there I started to realize that I hadn’t heard any case updates from the CFNIS lately and I was curious. So I called the case manager. We had a couple of back and forth calls. Basically his response to me was that he had been transferred and wasn’t really involved with my case anyways anymore. But he also said that the CFNIS couldn’t find anything about P.S. that would indicate that P.S. had ever been suspected of abusing children. (Remember, at this point in time the Canadian Forces had the court martial transcripts which indicated that P.S. was the star witness against Captain McRae and that Captain McRae’s defence counsel was trying to discredit P.S. because the military police knew in 1980 that P.S. had been sexually assaulting younger children on the base).

I ordered a beer to calm my nerves. But here’s the thing. When you suffer from major depression and severe anxiety, and alcoholism runs in your family, alcohol doesn’t calm you down. It just drives you further down into maddening depression.

I had a few more drinks. And because I didn’t really drink at the time, 3 or 4 beers would hit me a lot harder than let’s say someone who had been drinking a beer a day for 10 years. I think I had about 6 beers, each one driving me down deeper into despair.

I called the CFNIS case manager back and asked him what the point of living was if assholes like P.S. don’t get held responsible for what they’ve done in life. Again he started off with the “Mr. Bees, we can’t find any evidence against P.S.”. So I said fine, fuck it, I was going to go home and kill myself. How he asked. I said either jump out the window or slice my femoral arteries. After I got off the phone with him I realized that I was too drunk, and that I was now very depressed and angry. I also realized that I was probably going to hurt myself if I went home. I decided to go get checked out at a safe place. Work. I went in and started talking to the staff in the Emergency Dept at St. Paul’s. As I was in there, the CFNIS case manager called me back and asked me where I was. I told him I was at St. Paul’s and that I was going to get myself checked out. Fine, sure, okay. So I got admitted to the psych unit for observation.

I had a talk with a psychiatrist the next morning. I explained to him what had transpired between me and the CFNIS case manager. I explained to him what had happened on CFB Namao almost 30 years previous. He said that it was understandable that I had the reaction that I did. He asked me if I had ever wanted to harm myself previously, I told him that I had, but that I was never able to act upon it. He asked me if I still wanted to harm myself. I looked at him and said no.

So he released me that morning. Basically told me that with what had transpired 30 years previously and the previous evening that my reaction was to be expected. His discharge summary said “Adjustment Disorder with depressed mood”. It also listed “Alcohol Intoxication” as the pre-admission diagnoses. In his summary the psychiatrist mentioned that the police showed up after I had self-admitted. This is important as the CFNIS case manager in his account of the evening indicated that he literally saved my life by putting out an alert to the VPD and that the VPD had picked me up and brought me in to the hospital.

When I was released from the Comox unit I was setting in the waiting area. One of the porters came over and sat down beside me. He said ” So I see you spent the night”. I replied “Yep”. He said ” Don’t worry, you’d be surprised at how many staff members have actually spent a day or two in the psychiatric units”.

I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since then. That’s ten years and two months. Unlike my grandmother, I didn’t require a stint in A-A to quit. I think the fact that I drank so infrequently had a lot to do with this. Wasn’t hooked on the stuff so quitting something that I wasn’t addicted to was very easy.

Which brings me to the million dollar question.

WHY?

WHY AM I NOT AN ADDICT?

A counsellor that I was seeing in 2011 agreed with me that it was very surprising that I wasn’t an addict pushing a shopping cart up and down the alleys collecting cans to feed my drug habits considering my history of neglect, abuse, sexual abuse, and the fact that alcoholism is so prominent in my family.

As mentioned at the start of this entry I’ve never done heroin, I’ve never done coke, crack, meth, crystal meth, LSD, Special K, or any of the other multitude of drugs. I don’t smoke weed, I don’t eat mushrooms. I can’t stand prescription pain killers. And I can remember each and every time that I’ve had alcohol.

My childhood, all of the physical, mental, and sexual abuse, my untreated mental illnesses, these all should have put me on the streets.

When I first arrived in Vancouver back in 1992 I spent time living at some of the rooming houses in the DTES. I spent time staying at the Catholic Charities Hostel for Men on Cambie Street. I was in the prime habitat for starting a drug infused spiral into oblivion.

But I didn’t.

Even when my anxiety and my depression would keep me from sleeping and I’d wake up with horrific night terrors, I never once felt the need to self medicate.

And let’s face it. Not being an addict is a double edge sword.

On one hand I’ve had a clean life.

But on the other hand medical and psychiatric professionals are very doubtful of my stories when I tell them about my past because research shows that a high percentage of drug addicts were sexually abused as children and came from dysfunctional homes as children and had substance abuse problems in their genetic lineage.

And yet here I am, the only needle marks I have are from my tattoos or piercings.

So, did I really suffer that abuse?

And that’s when the self doubt sets in.

Maybe I wasn’t sexually abused for 1-1/2 years by P.S.

Maybe I was given wine in the rectory at the chapel because Captain McRae was a really nice guy and he just wanted me to enjoy a cup of wine.

Maybe I misunderstood Captain Totzke when he told me that I was a homosexual.

Maybe Richard really wasn’t that abusive, maybe he was a fun loving parent that spent every waking moment doting on his children, and maybe social services in three different provinces were really just good for nothing do-gooders that liked to stick their noses into other people’s business.

And you can see how the self doubt can start to be just as bad as the major depression and the severe anxiety.

Is there something special in my brain that makes me resilient to drug addiction or even the desire to try drugs?

That I don’t know.

Was it my exposure to my father’s alcoholism and my grandmother’s alcoholism that made me generally steer away from alcohol and illicit drugs?

I don’t know.

Was it my father’s abusive behaviour and rage anger that scared me away from ever taking drugs?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

But what I do know is that if anyone wants to study my brain to see what’s up, it’s available. At the moment it’s attached to a set of vocal cords and a pair of lungs and it can answer any questions you have. You’re even welcome to do fMRIs on it.

And if I do proceed with M.A.i.D. it’s yours to pop out of my skull and slice up and pickle with formalin and study to your little heart’s content.

Maybe my brain will help understand why some people from traumatic backgrounds never go on to have drug dependencies and why others who have had less traumatic experiences turn to drugs without a second thought.

A Societal Malcontent with an Axe to grind against the Canadian Armed Forces

People often wonder why I don’t simply go see a counsellor for my issues. Or in the alternative they often suggest that my issues can’t be that serious as I’ve never sought help.
Welcome to the twisted life of a military dependent.

That is one of the questions that an investigator from the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service asked my brother in 2011 after I had made my complaint to the CFNIS in 2011 about the actions of the babysitter from 1978 until 1980.

The other thing the investigator asked my brother was if I had trouble holding down secure employment suggesting that maybe I had made my complaint against the babysitter as a way of making money.

I know of the existence of these two questions as I have certified copies of the 2011 investigation.

The point of this post is not to go over the 2011 investigation.

The point of this post is to illustrate how the Canadian Armed Forces have always blamed the victim.

Blaming the victim is nothing new for the Canadian Forces. You need to only look at the various reports commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces over the years to understand that the Canadian Armed Forces have a significant issue with blaming the victim and that the Canadian Forces are very cognizant of the existence of this predisposition within the military community to blame the victim.

When a family member of P.S. found P.S. buggering me in the bedroom of his family’s military housing unit on base in late April early May I became a victim of sexual assault.

I would then also become a victim of the military’s attitude towards not only victims in general, but also the military’s attitude towards victims of male on male sexual abuse.

After being found in P.S.’s bedroom, I was told to go home. I lived right across the street from the P.S. family house. I lived in PMQ #11 – 12th street, he lived at PMQ #26 – 12th street.

I didn’t make it across the street before getting the shit beat out of me by a bunch of kids who were between 12 to 18. Remember, I would have been 8. P.S. was just weeks shy of his 15th birthday.

According to military records, the base military were coincidentally conducting an investigation into P.S. around the same time due to the numerous complaints that the military police had received about P.S. behaving improperly around young children. I don’t have the start date of this investigation, but I have no doubt that it was P.S. being found with me that started the ball rolling.

P.S. and I would have two very different tangents in life.

P.S. would go on to be convicted in civilian courts between 1982 and 1985 for molesting children.

When I spoke with the father of P.S. in July of 2015, P.S. was living in his father’s home. J.S. is the father of P.S.. J.S. had just had a leg amputated due to diabetes and he needed P.S. to be at home to help him with his care. P.S. at the time was facing trial for two counts of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement.

J.S. had apparently supported his son from 1980 onwards as he view his son as the true victim of Captain McRae.

In 1980 the Canadian Armed Forces needed ONE victim and one victim only. And that was P.S.

The rest of us kids, which according to J.S. was known to be over 25 children molested by both McRae and P.S., were not allowed to be victims.

My father wasn’t around at the time I was found in P.S.’s bedroom in late April or early May of 1980. My father did move back in with us in August of 1980. He brought his girlfriend Sue to live with us.

The start of the school year was an absolute disaster. Not a day would go by that I wasn’t taunted or teased or beat up for being a fag, a queer, a fucking homo, for doing what I had done with P.S..

“Robert and P____ up in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Robert with a baby carriage”

In October of 1980 my family was moved from Canadian Forces Base Namao 10km down the road to Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. Looking back now I have no doubt that it was the Canadian Forces that relocated my family, probably in an attempt to get me away from the kids on Namao. I’m also pretty certain that the reason we didn’t get moved off to bases in other provinces like the families of other victims is due to the amount of money the Canadian Forces had just spent training my father on CH-147 Maintenance Management.

There really was no reason for us to move from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach. My grandmother moved out not too long after our arrival at CFB Griesbach. So the 3 bedroom house that we lived in on CFB Namao would have been more than large enough for us.

This move also coincides with my father getting angry with me for what I had allowed P.S. to do to my younger brother. Richard had been living off base with Sue up to that point in time. He probably didn’t know about P.S. having been found buggering me in his bedroom, or the arrest and subsequent court martial of Captain McRae. But then again, my father had problems remember things as well. For example he “forgot” that in June of 1982 that he signed the paperwork placing me in the foster care system in Alberta.

When it was decided by military brass to get me off Namao, that’s more than likely when Richard was told what had happened and that I had been discovered with an older boy’s penis inside of me. After all, the Canadian Forces would have had to explain why they wanted us to move. Moving wouldn’t have been in Richard’s best interest as he could easily get pissed drunk at the mess on base and walk back home or be escorted back home by his drinking buddies and thus not risk losing his licence again. Living down on CFB Griesbach meant that he had to drive, and that meant that he couldn’t go to the mess on Namao to go drinking with his buddies.

This was also around the immediate time that I started engaging with a man name Terry. Terry would come to see me at the school on base for military children. Sometimes I would have to go see Terry over at a building near base head quarters.

I would have just turned 9 when I started seeing Terry in October of 1980.

I would learn in the summer of 2011 that Terry was Captain Terry Totzke, a social worker with the Canadian Armed Forces.

Terry seemed to know a great deal of my involvement with P.S.

I remember being told by Terry that I had a mental illness that was exhibited by me frequently having sex with P.S.. Terry would state that this mental illness was called homosexuality.

Terry would claim that because the encounters had happened so often, and that I never told anyone about them that I was just as ill as P.S. was.

Terry would tell me that boys do not have sex with other boys, that boys do not kiss other boys, and that boys do not touch other boys penises.

Terry would tell me that he had the base military police watching me and that if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy again that I would be sent off to the Alberta Hospital for psychiatric treatments.

My father would sometimes come to these meetings and he was obviously taking what Terry had to say very much to heart. I don’t think this was only due to Terry being a captain and my father being a master corporal. Homosexuality was viewed in a very contemptible fashion within the Canadian Forces back in the ’50s through to the ’90s.

So here I am, the eldest son of Richard, a man dealing with his own demons of depression, PTSD, and alcoholism , being told by a captain of the Canadian Forces that his son is very quite possible a homosexual.

I wasn’t a victim of Captain McRae and McRae’s 14 year old altar boy P.S..

Nope, I was a homosexual who through his own homosexual depravity had allowed his younger brother to be victimized by P.S..

There was one time when Richard and Terry had taken me off base to see a psychologist. On the drive back on base we drove past the military prison on CFB Griesbach. I can’t for the life of me remember if it was Terry or if it was Richard, but one of the two pointed at the brig and said to me that “if I didn’t smarten up and stop trying to kiss and touch other boys that I was going to end up in there just like the priest from Namao”

The major depression and severe anxiety that I was beginning to exhibit around the just made Richard and Sue much more angry. Even Terry didn’t seem to have much sympathy for my battles with depression and anxiety.

I remember getting the strap from Mr. Little, the principal of the school on base for military children. The Canadian Armed Forces ran these schools until 1994 when the Canadian Forces handed the schools over to the local school boards and got out of the business of educating military dependents. Because the military ran these schools, corporal punishment was allowed right up until 1994. I still remember getting the strap from Mrs. Potter on CFB Namao. But yeah, I got the strap quite frequently. And my father wanted to know when I got the strap so that I could get a spanking when I got home.

I don’t talk about Sue very often in my blogs. I don’t think she really knew what was going on back then. I don’t think Richard was honest with her as to all of the issues the Gill family had. And she did apologize to me in 2003 for the way things had been back then.

When you have major untreated depression and severe anxiety everything can induce tears. And when you’re only around 9 years old and you start developing these mental health issues, you have meltdowns and temper tantrums, which to a man with his own depression, PTSD, and alcoholism may come across as nothing more than an insubordinate child in need of a good belting or back hand.

Richards spankings were always the pants down kind and he had a thick leather belt.

And he’d often lose control, so much so that either Grandma or Sue would have to step in to stop him. I think that the reason he’d lose control is that the sound of crying would drive him bonkers. It would trigger something inside him.

The funny thing about grandma stopping Richard is that she could dish out corporal punishment pretty good herself. Which makes me wonder if Richard was just reacting to inter-generational violence. After all, grandma had been through Indian Residential School as a child. Grandma was an alcoholic by the time Richard was born when grandma was 23. Richard was already a good drinker by the time my mother met him in 1965. Which makes me wonder. Did Richard get his drinking from his mother? Was Richard born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?

The Canadian Forces and my father never allowed to be the victim of P.S. nor Captain McRae.

I was just a selfish crybaby who was fucking with his father’s military career.

The Canadian Forces had determined that I was never the victim of P.S., the abuse had gone on far too long for me to be a victim.

I was never allowed to be a child with mental illness, I was just a fucking selfish little asshole doing anything to get my way.

One of the ways that I learnt to avoid the wrath of Richard was to hide my emotions and to hide my wants and needs.

When I started seeing Pat and Wayne I wasn’t allowed to talk to them.

I was told periodically by my father and Terry that I had to be very careful what I told Pat and Wayne because if they found out that I liked boys that I’d be sent to a hospital.

When we’d start going to go see Pat and Wayne at the facility that had a one way mirror with a room behind the mirror, I was told by both my father and Terry that I had to watch what I said to Pat and Wayne and anyone else in the room as they would “twist my words” and make me say things that I didn’t want to say and that quite possibly that they would take me away from my father. To be on the safe side I should run my answer by my father first.

I honestly don’t think Pat and Wayne had any idea of what was going on, or what I had suffered through on CFB Namao from 1978 to 1980.

But to me they were the enemy. Both Terry and my father assured me that these people were not my friends nor were they there to help me.

I think this is one of the reasons I have never been able to interact with counsellors. My whole childhood was a lie. A lie to keep the public from discovering what had occurred on CFB Namao.

In 2011 I would discover that Pat and Wayne were social service workers with Alberta Social Services. Alberta Social Services had been called in by my teacher and my brother’s teacher in November of 1981 as the school though that Captain Totzke wasn’t having any success in helping my brother and I with the behaviour issues we were exhibiting.

I talked to Pat recently. She remembered me. She said that she knew there was something going on but that I was too afraid to say anything. She also said that once Alberta Social Services handed the case back to Captain Terry Totzke they had doubts that anything was going to improve for me.

Which brings me back to the heading at the top of this post.

The Canadian Armed Forces have always viewed victims as the cause of their own misfortunes. This is nothing new. It’s the way the military hierarchy functions. If you were sexually assaulted, or if you were physically assaulted, or if you were psychologically abused, you must have done something to deserve it. Or in the alternate, if you didn’t do anything to fend off the assaults, you must have either enjoyed the assaults or you were a willing participant in the assaults.

This attitude still prevails.

In 2016 during a meeting with the Minister of Parliament for Vancouver South, Harjit Sajjan, Mr. Sajjan asked me “what my game was” and “what angle was I playing”. To this day Mr. Sajjan refuses to meet with me as the Minister of National Defence. Something about having to legally act upon my concerns if I make my concerns known to him.

But, if you talk to anyone that I’ve worked for over the years or have worked with I’m definitely not a “Societal Malcontent with an axe to grind against the Canadian Armed Forces” nor do I “frequently jump from job to job frequently changing jobs”. I honestly don’t think that anyone at St. Paul’s knows of my troubled past or my unfortunate adventures as a military dependent.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I started working when I was young. Not because a 10 year old can make a fortune cleaning aquariums and rodent cages at pet shops, or because an 11 year old can make a killing washing pizza pans and fetching supplies at a pizza shop in a shopping mall. I started working because I could get validation. I could get everything from these strangers that I couldn’t get from home. Looking back I’m more than certain that everyone I worked for knew that I came from a troubled home and that I needed help.

Sure, St. Paul’s is finally closing down. But we didn’t know that until 2019.
During my time at St. Paul’s I’ve done the following:
1-Initiated the cooling tower replacement on Phase 1 / Phase 2.
2-Repaired a design flaw with the steam regulator system that would starve the facility for steam heating during the winter months.
3-Replaced old reciprocating compressors with newer more efficient screw compressors.
4-Initiated the replacement of the main Diesel fuel tanks once I had discovered that the original main tanks were leaking and couldn’t hold pressure.
5-Repaired a long standing flaw in the secondary chilled water loop that would starve Phase II for cooling water on warm days.
6-Upgraded all cooling and heating valves in Phase II to electronic ball valves.
7-Implemented electronic rounds and reading software for tracking readings taken by the shift engineer.
8-Started to implement an inventory control system that will be ported to the New St. Paul’s.
9- Pushed to have all the supply fans upgraded to variable speed drive removing the troublesome and maintenance intensive variable pitch mechanisms from the fans.
10-Upgrading the air filtration for the operating rooms.
11 – Upgraded the refrigeration monitoring in the hospital.
12- Upgraded the steam control valves for the main heat exchangers to allow for proper tight shut-off when the heating hot water temperature set point was reached.

And on and on and on.

So no. I’m not a societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the Canadian Armed Forces, nor do I frequently jump from employer to employer.

I’ve had a very long and laborious climb up the corporate ladder all the while carrying a sack full of shit from my past that has been tied around my neck.

I’m not rich, nor am I poor. I didn’t really have much growing up, and I never really expected much either.

But Bobbie, what about your class action against the Canadian Armed Forces —- GOTCHA!!!!!! See, you are just in this for the money.

Actually, no.

First, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence did that to themselves.

Second, M.A.i.D. for psychological reasons becomes legal in March of 2023.

I may not in fact be around to collect on the compensation that a judge determines that all class members are entitled to.

So no. I’m not just looking to make a quick buck.

And even with the hell that the Canadian Armed Forces have dragged me through since 1980 I don’t have an axe to grind with the military. Even I can understand that it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch and that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Riding my bicycle

This is me riding my bicycle.

I finally tried mounting my RAM mounts and my GoPro on the front basket of the bike. This seems to give a decent angle of view.

I have a RAM X-Mount for my iPhone. It’s the same mount that I use on my motorcycle.

I use the iPhone for music, and for maps. I don’t text or take phone calls when I’m riding, but having an easy view of the phone makes it easy for me to pull over and answer the important calls and ignore the calls that I can ignore.

Lucky for me I live just off the new bicycle path on Beach Ave. This isn’t a half bad path, but it does get very congested in the summertime. And the nice thing about reducing car traffic to two lanes, one in each direction, is that the racers and speeders have had to find a different place to go.

Vancouver is the bicycle theft capital of Canada. And such my bicycle lives either in my apartment or in my office at work.

Yes, this is what I wear when I ride my bicycle. I don’t own a single piece of “lycra” or “spandex”. I ride to and from work. I ride to and from the supermarket of coffee shop. I go out for dinner on my bicycle. I don’t like the idea of having to change from my “riding clothes” to my “destination clothes”.

Dresses, skirts, and kilts are what I wear. I don’t think I’ve worn a pair of pants on a bicycle since the mid 2000’s.

I ride for comfort. I’m not setting any speed records, nor am I setting any endurance records.

My earphones block much less outside noise than you average car. Most cars these days are extremely soundproofed. With my earphones on, I can still hear cars coming up beside me, I can hear emergency vehicles blocks away. I can hear car horns and voices. These are all things that I wouldn’t be able to hear in the typical everyday Econo-box car.

I’ve done some minor upgrades on the bike, mainly being that I replaced the cable operated disc brakes with hydraulic brakes. I’ve replaced the stock seat post with a shock absorbing post. I have the front and rear baskets. The next upgrade I’ll probably do is upsizing the disc brake rotors from 180 mm to 206 mm.

I’ve always loved bicycling over cars and even motorcycles.

I think there are two reasons for this.

First, as a kid living on military bases, a bicycle was an easy way to escape and for me to get away from Richard or my grandmother.

Second, my father’s temper behind the wheel turned most car trips into anxiety inducing adventures in road rage.

When I had my bicycles I could go for rides and not worry about coming home or needing rides from Richard.

No Rain

Just me. Talking about my bicycle and thinking of something to say.

Well, today is stopped raining.

The rain is nice to have after the long hot summer that we had. Vancouver is a city that really can’t handle temperatures of 40C

It’s nice to have the rain, but the rain keeps me from cycling.

When I was much younger I used to ride in the rain without a care.

When I first moved to Vancouver in 1992 I used to ride from my apartment in the West End of Vancouver over to Brunswick Lions Gate Lanes in West Vancouver. And this was back in the days before the bridge was up graded with proper width sidewalks that can accommodate one lane of bicycles and one lane of pedestrians.

There’s nothing like descending the south side of the bridge going into Vancouver with nothing more than cantilever rim brakes in the rain.

I’ve pretty well owned bicycles for the entire time that I’ve lived out here. There’s only been a couple of years when I didn’t ride.

But now with my e-bike I find that I am logging quite a few more kilometres per day / per week / per month than I ever had before. Legs, knees, and hips don’t get sore anymore. And it’s an upright step-through. Being upright doesn’t bother C4-C5-C6 in my neck. And being a step-through means that my dresses aren’t a problem.

I bought this bike back in January and I put 5,000 km on it back in August. Already had to put a new tire on the back. Due to the geometry of this bike the rear is carrying about 50% more weight than the front.

Well, I’m also officially fifty years old now. If I actually still ate at Denny’s I’d be five years away from the Seniors Discount. I don’t let my head hair grow in very often, but when I forget to shave for a couple of day I can see that my head hair is Snow White now.

I’ll have some observations to come up on other things, but for now it’s time to go out for a bicycle ride.

Suicide / Physician Assisted Suicide / Euthanasia / Medical Assistance in Dying.

Not much to say here, other than I try to describe the difference between suicide, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, and medical assistance in dying.

Okay, so I’m going to talk to the best of my abilities about what the differences between Suicide, Physician Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and Medical Assistance in Dying are. There really are no clear definitions used universally and some terms are used solely to stigmatize medical assistance in dying.

Suicide is an act of desperation. Suicide is the act of a mind that is so overwhelmed with emotions that it cannot think straight. If you’ve never suffered from major depression you’ll never know how tempting suicide is. Suicide is one of those things that no one ever talks about. As a society, we’re very hush-hush about this to the point that we like to pretend that it doesn’t exist. And if society does acknowledge the existence of suicide society often talks about how crazy the person was that committed suicide and how selfish they were and how much pain and suffering they selfishly inflicted upon others.

Suicide is often not planned for and as such family members, relatives, friends and co-workers can often be left devastated. Family members are often left wondering why their loved one committed suicide and if there were any signs they missed and if there was something they could have done. Suicide often has impacts on others as well such as the landlord or property owner that finds the body. The first responders and bystanders who may have witnessed the suicide will be affected.

How many suicides are there every year? This table is from the BC Coroner’s service.

6,102 people successfully committed suicide in the ten year period starting in 2008. I don’t remember hearing a single news story about these people, do you? Society again thinks that by not talking about suicide that suicide will just simply disappear.

What are the common methods of suicide?

When was the last time you heard of a suicide on the Skytrain? Next time, pay attention to the “Medical Emergency” announcement. Yet between 2008 and 2018 there were 32 successful suicides on the Skytrain. The most prevalent method of suicide is the rather barbaric method of hanging. Let’s be honest, self hanging is NOT the same as hanging used as execution. There is very little chance that the person using hanging as a method will know how to do the proper calculations to ensure a quick death.

And it should go without saying, but committing suicide by Skytrain or railway is not a guaranteed way to go. More often than not you will survive with horrific injuries that will haunt you for the rest of your life.

What is often not discussed is the number of suicide attempts per year. The only stats I can find say that in Canada on any given day 275 people attempt suicide. That’s over 100,000 people per year.

I am not a neurologist, but it’s safe to say that the human brain is fragile and can easily be damaged and not just by physical trauma. The human brain can easily be damaged by traumatic experiences. Because the human brain relies on chemicals to transmit and receive signals any disruptions to these chemicals can cause long term effects. The longer a person suffers from untreated major depression and severe anxiety the more profound the damage becomes.

No amount of telling a depressed person to not be sad or instead to think happy thoughts will fix brain damage caused by trauma. And in the end, no amount of medication of therapy will reverse the psychological damage caused by trauma.

However, the events leading up to suicide tend to be very short term problems that could possibly be dealt with if the person committing suicide believed that they had someone to listen to them.

Physician Assisted Suicide.

Physician assisted suicide is a term that fell out of favour just as quickly as it entered the national vocabulary. When a person with an incurable medical condition wishes to end their life so as not to prolong their needless suffering, they are not committing suicide. And as such, the physician supplying the medication is not assisting in a suicide.

Euthanasia.

Euthanasia is a term for when a person, typically a doctor, uses medications to end the life of a patient typically without the consent of the patient. Euthanasia is pretty well illegal just about everywhere in the world. The only place that anything close to Euthanasia is practiced in on death row when prisoners are executed.

As much as I am in favour of any mentally competent adult, and children in very strictly controlled circumstances, ending their life for any medical or psychological issue, I don’t think that physicians should be able to decide on their own, or the next of kin for that matter, should be allowed to end the life of another person without very careful consideration from the courts.

Medical Assistance in Dying.

M.A.i.D. is the term for when a person applies to use medications prescribed for the sole purpose of dying. As I’ve said before, M.A.i.D. is something that has to be applied for, and it has to be planned for. When I apply for M.A.i.D. I can promise you that there will be a battery of tests that I will have to go through. It will not be as simple as me just going to my doctor and asking for a note.

Unlike suicide, almost every detail of M.A.i.D. is planned out from start to finish.

And unlike suicide, the medications used will ensure a proper death and not just an attempt.

If the proper drugs are used in the proper dosages the person undergoing the procedure will not feel pain and will not even be aware of their death.

And because M.A.i.D. is always undertaken with a sound, rational, and lucid mind, the person undergoing the procedure can stop the procedure at any time right up until the loss of consciousness. For obvious reasons you can’t withdraw your consent once the Propofol hits your brain.

And yes, during the entire M.A.i.D. process from application to the final day, the person electing to undergo the procedure will be frequently asked if they wish to continue forth or if they want to abandon the procedure.

The where, when, and how will be scheduled like clockwork. There will be no corpse for an unsuspecting landlord or relative to discover. Arrangements are typically made for the disposal of the body after the procedure. There will be no curious absence from work. People who need to be informed will be informed. And the answers as to why will be available to anyone who asks.

Why? Why do you want to kill yourself.

I prefer the term “going to sleep”. Kill implies violence. I’m just going to sleep. A sleep like the 18,250 sleeps that I’ve gone through in my life. Just that this is a sleep that I will never rouse from.

For 42 years now I’ve had to deal with the fallout from CFB Namao. What happened on that base is not something that one can simply get over and forget about. Then there’s the after effects of being swept up in the desire of the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces to keep the actions of P.S. and Captain McRae under wraps least the Canadian public discover what happened.

The Canadian Forces determined that my mental health and my mental wellbeing were sacrificial to the greater cause. Whether or not you like to admit it, the Canadian Forces chain of command sentenced me to death in 1980.

For 42 years I lived with and internalized major depression, severe anxiety, gender and orientation confusion, the inability to form friendships, the inability to form intimate relationships, the inability to enjoy life.

I’m 50 years old now. Seriously, I’m now fifty as I type this out. I honestly never thought that I would live to see this milestone.

I am very tired. I’ve fought the depression and the anxiety for as long as I could. I’ve hidden the depression and anxiety with every fibre in my body. I’ve tried my hardest to appear normal. But I am damaged. To say that I am not damaged is to minimize what occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao when I was 7 to 8-1/2. To say that I am not damaged is to minimize my mistreatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke from age 9 to 11-1/2. To say that I am not damaged is to overlook the fact that I was supposed to have been institutionalized due to how bad my mental health had deteriorated by the time I was 11 years old.

I am damaged due to the wilful neglect of others. I am damaged due to the fact that others kept me from receiving timely counselling, therapy, and medication.

The damage was allowed to fester untreated and unmanaged for almost 42 years now.

There is no fixing this damage.

Just because I no longer cry myself to sleep at night doesn’t mean that this damage doesn’t affect me anymore. It just means that I’ve run out of tears to cry and I am almost completely dead on the inside.

The time for “fixing” me was in 1980. Not 2021.

My entire life was wasted because DND and the CF had a secret to hide.

I am actually at peace with myself now.

The more I think about how close I am to the end and how peaceful the transition from living to dead will be I become filled with a feeling of serenity. It’s actually a beautiful peaceful feeling.

I have a lot of unwanted people living in my skull, and they won’t voluntarily leave. They need to be forcefully evicted.
P.S.;
Captain Father Angus McRae;
The man in the sauna;
Captain Terry Totzke;
My father, Mcpl Richard Wayne Gill;
The other victims of P.S. that I keep seeing him abuse over and over;
Earl Ray Stevens;
And many others.

When I go to sleep they’ll never bother me again.

When I go to sleep my major depression and my severe anxiety will never trouble me again.

When I go to sleep I will never wake up in the middle of the night due to horrific dreams.

When I go to sleep I will never again grind my teeth down to nothing.

When I go to sleep I will never be crushed under the weight of a severe anxiety attack.

When I go to sleep my gender and orientation issues will never bother me again.

When I go to sleep all I will ever know is silence.

And after the life that I’ve been through never ending silence is fine by me.

This blog.

In this post I will briefly touch on some of the issues that I’m facing and why I am pursuing some of the paths that I am pursuing.

I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted this blog to go when I started it.

I envisioned this blog ( beeshive.ca ) as being separate from ( cfbnamao.ca ). And it will be.

My other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is more about the trauma and abuse I went through as a child living on a Canadian Armed Forces base that was gripped by the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal that the Canadian Armed Forces buried out of fear of the public humiliation that would have resulted had the Canadian public found out that an officer of the regular force had sexually abused children on a secure defence establishment for just short of two years.

The other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is also where I go through the flaws in the National Defence Act which allow DND to hide and bury pre-1998 incidents of child sexual abuse.

This blog is intended to deal with the day to day or week to week goings on in my life.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to post in this blog or how personal I wanted to get.

There are things I will talk about on this blog, and there are things I won’t talk about on this blog. The ones I won’t talk about are more to do with how boring they actually are.

I’ve been told by one of my counsellors before that I should write a book about my life. The problem is that I’m not a writer. I can type, and I can write blogs. So I figured that I would at least get my story out. It will be in blog form, and it will probably jump around from topic to topic a lot. Sure, I won’t make any money from this, but at least it gets my story out and allows me to tell my side of things.

Some of the issues that I write about will make a lot of people very uncomfortable. And that’s fine. It’s been a really weird life, and I’ve got a lot of issues and a lot of demons.

For a brief refresher, I was a military dependent as a child. My father served in the Canadian Armed Forces. I lived on military bases in military housing from birth until age 16. My father was an alcoholic with anger issues, he had depression and he also suffered no doubt from PTSD due to a naval incident that happened in 1969. He self medicated with alcohol and was quick to anger. Everyone minded their own business in the military housing on base and lots of people, including the military police would just turn a blind eye. My mother left when I was 5. She couldn’t take my father’s drinking or physical abuse. My father brought his own mother, a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools, into the house to raise my brother and I as my father was frequently absent. It is because of my grandmother’s heavy drinking that my younger brother and I ended up being sexually abused by the base chaplain and his 14 year old altar boy for just over 1-1/2 years. In the fallout of the CFB Namao scandal, I spent 2-1/2 years in the care of the military social worker receiving conversion therapy. A couple of years later, I would end up being sexually abused by a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces who was working as a commissionaire at the armouries where I was in cadets. There’s a lot more dysfunction in my life, but that’s a basic run down.

In 2011 I obtained my foster care records, which I never knew existed. Turns out that in the aftermath of the CFB Namao matter, I was so depressed, so anxious, and so emotionally disturbed that I was supposed to have been institutionalized. That never happened though because the Canadian Forces needed to keep the Captain McRae matter under the rug and out of the public eye. In fact, my father was posted out of the jurisdiction of Alberta in order to ensure that I was taken out of the jurisdiction of Alberta Social Services so that my apprehension would never occur.

So, I suffered with diagnosed but untreated mental illness for 42 years.

Mental illness that various doctors were noting was getting more and more out of hand.

And for the most part I think I got everything “under control” and “hidden”. You learn quickly in life how to hide mental illness and depression and anxiety.

Things have popped up in the past, but you can only keep the lid on a boiling pot for so long before the roiling bubbles lift the lid.

I’ve had an interesting career trajectory.

Most employers that I’ve work for hired me because they could see that I was very technically skilled and that I had a very obvious ability to deal with technical issues. But, the one thing that most employers had remarked is that I lacked the personal skills required for advancement.

In 2011, after the Canadian Forces military police let slip to me that my babysitter had been involved with the base chaplain and that the base chaplain had been kicked out of the military for molesting children, I started to see a counsellor.

I started going over my history with this counsellor. I started discussing all of the paperwork I had uncovered. All of my personal records that I had found. The lawsuit between my babysitter and the Minister of National Defence in 2001. The out of court settlement in November of 2008.

My counsellor said to me that I reminded him of a character in a series of books that he had read, and he wanted to know if I had ever heard about “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I had actually. I had already read the books and had already seen the films. My counsellor said that the parallels between my life and the life of Lisbeth Salander were remarkable. We were both very damaged people, but we were both very smart, very tech savvy, and able to put the puzzle pieces together.

And yeah, that’s pretty true. I have no interpersonal skills. I can relate with people on technical issues and in technical discussions, but outside of that I’m lost. I don’t make small talk. I’m not interested in discussing family life. Wanna talk about work, sure, I’m your man. Wanna talk about your sister’s wedding, or what happened in the sportsball game last night? Nope, not interested in the least.

Due to the “conversion therapy” I received from the military social worker I have no honest idea of what my gender is or what my orientation is. And sex is kinda a moot point anyways as (a) I really don’t like being touched, (b) I really don’t like being touched in a sexual manner, (c) I find sex to be repulsive, (d) I honestly don’t know if I’m GLBTQ. And it probably doesn’t help that my years of untreated and unmanaged depression and anxiety mean that I don’t like getting personal with people. I have honestly had very few partners of either gender in my life.

So, for the record I am the Chief Engineer at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, BC. This is a position that I’ve held since May of 2020. Prior to that I was the Acting Chief Engineer while we reclassified the power plant. Prior to being Acting Chief Engineer I was the Assistant Chief Engineer since about 2017. Prior to that I was a maintenance power engineer for about 11 years.

Power engineering was recommended to me back in 2002. It was a pathway to a decent paying job for a person who didn’t have the funds or the support to take a trade course.

St. Paul’s Hospital is being relocated to the False Creek Flats. Construction of the new hospital should be completed in about 7 years. I’ve had involvement with the planning and design of the new hospital. The old St. Paul’s Hospital will probably continue to operate for at least one or two years after the new hospital is open in order to ensure that all of the programs and clinics transfer from one site to the other without any disruption.

St. Paul’s hospital on Burrard will more than likely be my final place of employment. The hospital and I have been taking care of each other for the last 17 years. And we’ll take care of each other for the next few years.

Now, I will unequivocally state that the future of St. Paul’s Hospital has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to explore the possibility of Medical Assistance in Dying.

I am not looking at M.A.i.D. out of fear for my future. Even though the new St. Paul’s will have either a 2nd class power plant or a 3rd class power plant, which means that I cannot be the chief at the new hospital, there would still be ample positions for me in the power plant none the less.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that because of what I’ve done over my tenure at St. Paul’s that Senior Leadership would create a position for me if they had to.

I bring this up because I forgot that one of the Senior Leaders from Providence Health Care follows my twitter feed and saw my postings about M.A.i.D.

I am actually very proud of the work that I’ve done at St. Paul’s and the innovations that I’ve brought to the Physical Plant. I have a good team under me and I have good leaders above. The other trades and I get along very well.

In a way, being at St. Paul’s has probably allowed me to deal with my mental health issues as I could take off sick days on the days where I was completely incapable of getting out of bed in the morning.

Being at St. Paul’s has also allowed me to be as odd and weird as I want because so long as you’re doing the work required of you both HR and the union don’t care, and if they don’t care then the personal opinions of others don’t matter.

COVID last year was an absolute disaster and extremely disruptive to the physical plant. But COVID was far from the sole reason for my breakdown this past spring.

I’ve run as far and as hard as I can.

For 42 years I’ve been hauling around baggage that no person should ever have to carry.

For 42 years I’ve been denied treatment, help, and acknowledgement for issues that were far beyond my control.

The years of childhood neglect, the physical, mental and sexual abuse, the years of self loathing, self hatred, the feelings of emptiness and worthlessness, and the realization that I had been sacrificed by the Canadian Armed Forces to keep their secrets hidden finally came home to roost.

All of it is finally catching up.

I’m tired.

I want to go to sleep.

I don’t want any memories of the past.

I don’t want to remember being caught in P.S.’s bedroom.

I don’t want to remember the sexual abuse on CFB Namao. And let’s be very clear, P.S. could be very aggressive and depraved. This was not, as Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki opined in October 2011, “childhood curiosity and experimentation “. P.S. would vent his own anger and hatred on the kids he was abusing, so let’s not mince any words here. There was no fun enjoyed by his victims.

I don’t want to remember watching P.S. sexually abuse my younger brother.

I don’t want to remember P.S. sexually abusing the other kids.

I don’t want to remember the five distinct visits to the chapel on CFB Namao to see Captain McRae in his living quarters. Visits that always ended with a sickly sweet grape juice. One of these visits hurts the most and will always stand out in my mind. I was with my father over at the storage unit he rented for his motorcycle. My father wasn’t around a lot. He’d bugger off for weeks or months on end and leave us in the care of his mother who was living on base with us. I really wasn’t helping him work on his motorcycle, but I just wanted to be near him. P.S. came walking by and asked my father if he wanted P.S. to look after me. I looked at my father hoping that he would say no. My father told me to go with P.S. and stay with him. P.S. took me right to the chapel.

After Mcpl Christian Cyr let slip to me in May of 2011 that the base padre Captain McRae had been arrested for molesting children on the base in 1980, I broke down and told him about the five visits to the rectory and the sickly sweet grape juice. And not having any memories after the grape juice. The CFNIS spent the entire rest of the investigation trying their best to gaslight me. When I finally received the court martial transcripts and the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork it killed me to find out that the CFSIU in 1980 knew that Captain McRae was luring children into the chapel and would give them alcohol before sexually assaulting them. The CFNIS had these documents in their possession through the entire 2011 CFNIS investigation.

I don’t want to remember my father threatening to kill me for fucking with his military career. When my father received his compassionate posting from CFB Summerside to CFB Namao in 1978 he ended up being attached to 447 squadron. 447 was the home of the tandem rotor heavy lift and troop transport helicopters. He arrived at that squadron when it was brand new. 447 Sqn wasn’t officially stood up until January 1979. I never knew what position my father had at 447. He would always go off on training exercises sometimes for 6 to 8 weeks at a time. The Chinooks were his escape from the responsibilities of his family. He could run off with his military buddies and leave me and my brother at home with his alcoholic mother who would hire P.S. to be our babysitter. In 2019 I learnt about my father’s death in 2017. I filed an ATI request with Library and Archives Canada for his service records. LAC complied and released a partial amount. But it was more than enough for me to understand that I really wasn’t exaggerating when I say that Richard despised me for “fucking with his military career”. Just after our arrival on CFB Namao in the summer of 1978, the Canadian Forces sent my father to Boeing-VERTOL for Maintenance Management training on the Chinook. Here he was, a kid from Fort McMurray, a kid with bugger all for formal education, and he was going to be a key player in the hierarchy of 447 Sqn. My abuse at the hands of P.S. caused us to be relocated off CFB Namao and sent down to CFB Griesbach. And then when Alberta Social Services divulged their plan to remove me from the home, the Canadian Forces arranged for my father to be posted to CFB Downsview in Ontario. Yeah, it looks as if he was right when he would often rage out that I had “fucked with his military career”. Sure, as a 50 year old man I fully understand that none of this was my fault. However when you’re 11 years old, you don’t understand this. When your father tells you that you fucked with his military career, that’s it, you fucked with his military career. You can’t undo the yelling, the screaming, the backhands, the belts. I lived through his rage, and there is no removing it from my brain.

I don’t want to remember the times my father would beat me and then beat me again for crying. Nothing would get Richard more enraged than crying. And what’s a sexually abused child with major depression and severe anxiety going to do? They tend to cry.

I don’t want to remember trying to hide under my captain’s bed to keep my father from getting hold of me. Richard could lose his temper. I learnt quickly that I could hide from Richard under my captain’s bed. Once he figured out where I was hiding he took all of the panels off the bed. I lost my safe space.

I don’t want to remember hoping and wishing all the time on CFB Griesbach that I would die in my sleep and never wake up again.

I don’t want to remember my grandmother’s alcoholism or my father’s alcoholism.

I don’t want to remember how Earl Stevens used his position of authority at the Dennison Armouries in Toronto to entrap me into providing sexual favours to him. Somehow Earl knew that I was a military dependent and that my father was in the Canadian Armed Forces and that I lived on a military base. Earl was retired from the Canadian Armed Forces and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he preyed upon children living on the bases that he was stationed at. He knew that if he touched me that blackmailing me would be very simple as male on male sexual assault is something that no one ever talked about on base. In fact you knew that if you got sexually abused on base the last people you ever wanted to find out were the military police or your own family.

I don’t want to remember the times my father would get angry at my school teachers for wanting to help me or to encourage me to take my hobbies seriously. This one I can’t really speak to or understand. Most parents would have died to have their child put extra effort into school. Not Richard. Just go to fucking school, stare at the fucking blackboard, and stop showing off.

I don’t want t remember being mugged in 1995 by a guy and his girlfriend only to have a Vancouver Police Officer tell me that he wasn’t going to investigate my mugging because he was certain that I was a homosexual prostitute. Even when I found a video tape that had the two suspects on it and showed the proximity to me in a line-up, this police constable refused to look at the matter.

I don’t want to remember all of the people in positions of authority who took advantage of my technical skills to make themselves look better while at the same time limiting my potential due to my lack of education.

I don’t want P.S., Captain Father Angus McRae, Captain Terry Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, my father, or my grandmother living in my head. They all need to go.

I don’t want to remember all of the kids who beat the shit out of me as I left P.S.’s house the day I had been caught in his bedroom.

I don’t want to remember the kids at the various schools who used to beat the shit out of me for being different and not normal. Sure, I might have been odd and a bit of an asshole, but the Canadian Armed Forces decided that their secrets were worth more than my psychological well-being.

I don’t want to deal with the crushing major depressions or the severe anxiety anymore. I don’t want to wake up with night terrors, or have to have teeth removed because Ive cracked them due to excessive grinding. The anxiety is not fun. The major depression is a literal killer.

Sure, the Lexapro has brought the anxiety under control and seems to have tamed the anxiety monster, but they’re still there. I can feel their presence. I know they’re just waiting for my body to build up a tolerance to the serotonin and then they’ll come roaring back with a vengeance.

I’ve had the suicide monster lurking in my brain ever since the days of living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. The suicide monster is kinda easy to keep under control. But it’s there none the less. If I didn’t have a suicide monster living in my head after all that I’ve gone through then that would truly indicate that something was wrong.

So yeah.

There’s a lot of baggage in my skull. There’s a lot of trauma. There’s a lot of damage.

I’m tired, and I don’t want any of this anymore.

Knowing that the end is possibly within reach actually fills me with hope.

Think I’ll stop this post here.

M.A.i.D. pt 2

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.

M.A.i.D. pt 1

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.

The next post will be M.A.i.D. pt 2

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Bus

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.

15 mg

Well, I’m up to 15 mg of Escitalopram now.

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.