depression – Page 34

The Informal Resolution pt.2

On Thursday April 21st, I had a sit down with Captain Chelsea St-Amand and Sergeant David Winship, both of the CFNIS Western Region detachment.

The meeting took place in a boardroom at VPD Headquarters and ran from 13:00 until 16:00.

On the complaint form that I had submitted to the MPCC I had selected the option box indicating that I would be open to an informal resolution so I got an informal resolution meeting.

So, first off I’ll apologize to Sgt. Winship for the complaint I brought against him, not because my complaint was without merit, but because as I discovered during the meeting that Sgt. Winship was not the lead investigator in my matter against the man from the sauna.

The lead investigator in my matter is actually Sgt. Justin Brady.

Sgt. Winship is actually the case manager.

Some of the highlights that came out of the meeting.

Sgt. Winship agreed that unlike a member of the Canadian Forces who can go through their chain of command to voice concerns and complaints against the CFNIS, as a civilian I do not have access to that avenue. I only have the MPCC and at that the MPCC doesn’t take complaints about “investigations”, the MPCC only accepts “conduct” complaints against investigators. This oversight in the National Defence Act seems to come from the mistaken understanding that only military members who can make complaints via their chain of command are the only persons making criminal complaints to the CFNIS. Civilian victims of crime such as myself are outliers that weren’t planned for.

(As a side note, as a civilian the prospect of redress is also unavailable to me. Redress is where a complaint is made directly to the Chief of Defence Staff and the CDS can review any matter brought to their attention. This is how Stephanie Raymonde was able to have her matter looked at again in 2014)

We talked for a bit about my distrust of the military justice system related to the news from the ’90s and pretty well up to the current day. The horrific flaws with the National Defence Act that had to be fixed due to the inability of the military justice system to deal with the illegal actions in Bosnia and Somalia. Then there were the findings of Madame Marie Deschamps in 2015 that found that the military justice system could not properly conduct sexual assault investigations, and the 2021 recommendations of former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour that only civilian police be allowed to investigate military sexual assaults which resulted in Minister of National Defence Anita Anand ordering all current sexual assault investigations be moved to the civilian police.

I also discussed how I could never bring myself to trust the CFNIS after they took my father’s statement at full face value and never attempted to re-interview my father when my foster care records were made available to the CFNIS in 2011 and indicated that there were very serious concerns with my father’s statement. My father’s statement had a significant impact on the Crown’s decision to not lay charges against P.S. as my father claimed there was never a babysitter in the house.

Which brings up my matter and which was the cause of the MPCC complaint and the informal resolution meeting. Sgt. Winship assures me that there is nothing political with the decision for the CFNIS to retain my investigation. Sgt. Winship says that my investigation was sent for review and it was decided to keep it within the CFNIS because they were at the stage of interviewing both P.S. and R.B..

I don’t know how receptive P.S. will be to being interviewed by the CFNIS. The more I think about it the more I believe that P.S. attempted suicide in the year 2000 as too many brats from CFB Namao kept making complaints against him. So I’m pretty sure that P.S. will no doubt have a good attorney who will tell him to tell the CFNIS to go away.

R.B. is a different matter. The CFNIS are still waiting for Library and Archives Canada to give the CFNIS a copy of R.B.’s service file. I find it sad that law enforcement doesn’t have priority access to service files at the LAC.

We talked for a bit about counselling and if I’ve tried to access it. I explained that one of the most significant issues that I have with receiving counselling is that almost every counsellor that I’ve dealt with to date is unfamiliar with the military aspect of what I went through. Having a military social worker who was blaming me for basically allowing myself to be sexually abused really fucks with one’s brain. Being labelled by this military social worker as being a homosexual is just as bad as being blamed for the abuse. Having a father at home, who due to his rank of Master Corporal, was probably placing very special emphasis on what the Captain was saying was just as fucking devastating as what the Captain was saying. And even Sgt. Winship agreed that there is no way that I will be able to deal with the sexual assault components on their own without dealing with all of the other aspects. Sgt. Winship mentioned that male on male sexual assaults were just handled a lot differently back then. I added that I think what really bad was when Captain David Pilling requested that Warrant Officer Fred Cunningham investigate Captain Father Angus McRae for committing “Acts of Homosexuality” with boys on CFB Namao that this tarred all of McRae’s and P.S.’s victims as also being “homosexuals”. And back in the day, the official policy of the Canadian Armed Forces was that homosexuality was a mental defect. To this end, Sgt. Winship said that when he got back to Edmonton that he would talk to some counsellors that he knew of that specialized in treating survivors of military sexual assault trauma who also work with civilians to see if the would be able to somehow bring their military services into the civilian realm. We also discussed a bit about how military dependents such as myself are ineligible for assistance through the Canadian Armed Forces and how most provinces balk at picking up the costs for counselling or therapy, especially if the former dependent is living in a province where the assaults did not occur. Members and former members of the Canadian Forces can receive help no matter where they live. This is not true for former military dependents.

Communication is one of the things that we discussed. Just a periodic heads up along with an explanation of the current status of the investigation would be great.

We did briefly discuss the fallout of the Lamer Report, the findings of the Somalia Commission, the findings of Madame Marie Deschamps, recommendations of former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour. I also brought up some of the concerns that the Military Police Complaints Commission has voiced about the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, a position that is not law enforcement and is not a sworn peace officer, making recommendations and issuing instructions for any CFNIS investigation and that how even though in theory the Provost Marshal is supposed to make those recommendations or instructions available to the “public” that all the Provost Marshal has to do is post a copy of those instructions in the 10th floor coffee room at National Defence Head Quarters and the Provost Marshal has met their obligation.
Sgt. Winship is adamant that he would not allow the chain of command to interfere with his investigations.
I brought up the matter of Corporal Stuart Langridge and how CFNIS investigator Sgt. Matthew Ritco had told the MPCC Inquiry that CFNIS brass had rewritten his report and instructed him to sign the new report.
Again Sgt. Winship insisted that he would have refused to sign the report.

All in all it was a productive meeting.

I’m still very wary of the CFNIS and the Canadian Forces, but at least I feel more comfortable with Sgt. Winship and the current investigation into the man in the sauna.

The Informal Resolution

Not going to delve too far into my meeting with the CFNIS today at VPD headquarters right now. I’m just in the process of running out the door to a concert. But I will have something to say by tomorrow.

Who knew that it would be this hard.

Disposing of a body is harder than one could imagine.

So……

It doesn’t look as if I will be able to donate my brain after my death.

And this kinda saddens me a bit.

I had always envisioned that my brain would serve some useful purpose.

After all I survived:
– sexual abuse
-mental abuse
-physical abuse
-neglect

I have lived with and coped with:
-CPTSD
-Major Depression
-Severe Anxiety
-The effects of military conversion therapy

The thought of death has never been very far.

Depression runs in my family.

And yet not once have I stuck a needle in my arm or snorted anything up my nose or toked on anything. The last time I had a drink was in July of 2011 and even then I was a very infrequent drinker.

I’ve had to deal with personality issues caused no doubt by the various traumas and abuses.

And yet I’ve somewhat navigated life and ended up with stable employment even if it is not at the level of employment that I could have risen to.

This rise is something that I’ve done on my own with absolutely no help from my father or my family. During all of the times I was unemployed in the early ’90s Richard was of no use. Even when I was on Skid Row in Vancouver and Toronto my father was of no assistance.

I did this all on my own.

You would think that research labs would want to know what it was inside my brain that allowed me to go from basically non-functional and requiring psychiatric institutionalization at age 10 to being the Chief Engineer of a hospital at 47.

Nope.

It’s like the field of depression research is oblivious to confirmation bias. By this I mean that researches are obviously looking for answers where they expect to find them, in the brains of depressed people who have not fared well in life. Or the researches go looking for the answers to drug addiction in the brains of those who were abused and who succumbed to drugs and other forms of self medication. They often use the brains of those who have never suffered from depression in their lives as a reference point. And that’s great if you’re only concerned about the two extremes, but it gives you absolutely no data about those in between the two extremes.

Where my body goes after my death? Don’t know really. So long as it isn’t cremated or buried, I’m cool with that.

Medical school would be nice.

But medical schools like UBC pose a problem in the sense that they only take “whole body” donations for their medical students to dissect. If my brain were to be removed immediately after my death, then UBC wouldn’t take my body.

Conversely, no brain research program would take my brain after it had been removed from my skull by medical students.

Now, of course this is all really silly when you think about it isn’t it?

After I’m dead they could launch by body into space and I wouldn’t have the foggiest clue, would I. What they do with my corpse and my brain after I’m dead and gone is really a matter of trust. But still…….

You don’t look depressed.

How is a depressed person supposed to look?

One of the issues that I seem to have when being taken serious about my desire to seek Medical Assistance in Dying for mental health issues is that I don’t look “sad”, or “depressed”, or “unhappy”.

I appear smart and intelligent.

Piercings and tattoos are the only form of “self harm” that I engage in. And no, I don’t consider my tattoos or my piercings to be “self harm” or a “cry for help”.

Surely if I was depressed and wanting to die I’d be on drugs, or living on skid row, or a frequent flyer in the local psychiatric wards.

But that’s my problem.

I’ve always been on my own.

I’ve never had anyone to fall back on in times of trouble.

I’ve had to navigate life so fucking carefully that I didn’t end up an drug junkie or an alcoholic on skid row where people could say that I was the captain of my own misfortune.

If I had followed through on any of my previous suicide attempts and not succeeded there would have been absolutely no help from my father. In fact there only would have been shame and ridicule.

I’ve struggled with the fact that if I make one misstep that I’d have a very long fall down the ladder of society.

And believe me, the number of people that attempt suicide and fail far outnumber the number of people that attempt suicide and succeed.

My first attempt was way back on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach when I was about 9. I honestly don’t remember what I thought I was doing. I put the bag over my head and I held the bag around my neck. I kept breathing in and out, but as my lungs started to burn I couldn’t hold the bag any more and I let go of the bag.

The next time I tried was again on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. This time I taped the bag around my neck thinking that would work better. It didn’t. Again I couldn’t get past the burning in my lungs and I ripped the bag off my face.

I had no idea that killing myself was actually going to be this painful.

The next time I tried suicide was in Toronto when I was living on Canadian Forces Base Downsview. This was before my bedroom had been moved downstairs into the basement in 1986. I had done a “practice run” at the Bloor-Yonge station. I actually did two practice runs. Both times I would wait on the Yonge platform until the trains had left. Then I’d take a little run and jump down on to the tracks. This was just to see if I could work up the nerve to jump down. I would then vault across the 3rd rails and climb up on the other platform and then out of the station.

However, when it came time to do it, I just couldn’t work up the nerve to jump in front of the train.

I don’t mean to sound cliche, but I did try the Bloor Street Vaiduct. Just couldn’t get the nerve to get over the railing.

There were a lot of things that kept me from following through.

Pain. I think my fear of pain has always ranked up there as the #1 reason why I haven’t succumbed to suicide. I really don’t want to spend my last 5, 1o, or 15 minutes on Earth in severe pain, gasping for breath and feeling the pain of broken bones.

Even worse, I always had visions of Andy Anderson with tubes in his skull as the doctors did everything to save his life after he slipped and fell in the bathtub in our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Namao. Andy honestly had no life after that. They should have just let him die after his first series of blood clots and strokes. He spent the subsequent 5 years “living” in the Mewburn nursing home. He had been warehoused with other people who could no longer function on their own. And that’s another fear that I had. That I would do just enough damage to myself and that some asshole would “save me” and that I’d spend the rest of my “life” living in a facility being fed with a feeding tube.

Yet another reason that I couldn’t ever work up the courage to kill myself is my fear of Richard. I knew that if I had succeeded in killing myself that I would never have to be afraid of Richard again. But what I was afraid of the most is what Richard would do after I was dead. I knew that after I was dead that Richard would be free to blame my suicide on my insanity, that I committed suicide to weasel my way out of accepting responsibility for what I had allowed P.S. to do to my younger brother.

Richard had also impressed upon me from my time with the psychologists and social workers in Edmonton that “I was just acting up to get attention”. And as Richard had really impressed upon me that I was a worthless piece of shit that had fucked with his military career, the last thing I wanted to be seen as was an “attention seeker”.

I had so many reasons to kill myself back in the days of CFB Namao, CFB Griesbach, and CFB Downsview, but yet I couldn’t “man up” and do the deed because I was worried about what my father would say and do. Pretty fucking lame dontcha think?

My next attempt at suicide came in 1994.

I was unemployed. I was collecting E.I. as it was known back then. I had just returned from a disastrous trip out to Toronto to take a job that fell through. My E.I. got cut off because my E.I. cards were still being sent to my Toronto address so I ended up collecting welfare in B.C.

At this point in my life I had been on welfare in three different provinces. Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia at different points in time between the summer of 1991 and the spring of 1994. I had slept in various Salvation Army houses, as well as different charity dorms.

And no, there was no fucking way on Earth that I was going to endure the humiliation of calling Richard and asking him for assistance that I know wouldn’t be coming anyways.

I know the exact date of the 1994 attempt.

It was the very early morning of Sunday June 12th, sometime after midnight.

I had scoped out the Lions Gate Bridge for around a week prior. And I knew that after midnight car traffic dwindled to almost nothing. I wasn’t planning to jump of the bridge in the typical manner. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want anyone to stop me. Earlier in the day on June 11th I had gone to a BC Liquor store and purchased a 6 pack of whatever. I didn’t drink very often, so I knew that a 6 pack would take away my chickenshit fear and would allow me to jump.

When I got to the bridge I waited for a break in traffic, then I headed onto the bridge and got to where the maintenance gondola was parked. The bridge had a gondola underneath that allowed maintenance crews to service and paint the bridge from underneath. There really wasn’t any type of security on this gondola which was amazing when you think about it. So over the railing I went and I climbed down the ladder and onto the gondola.

I don’t knowhow long I was under there. I didn’t have a watch, and this was years before I owned a cellphone. But eventually I drank the last of the six beers. The gondola was parked perfectly over the footing for the south side pylon. If I just sat on the rail of the gondola and leaned back I could hit the footing without bouncing off of any of the ironwork for the pylon. It should be quick and I was so pissed that I probably wouldn’t feel anything. But now I was fucking hallucinating. There was P.S. and my father holding hands and laughing at me. Both of them were calling me a cocksucker, a faggot, a homo. I passed out. I woke up a little while later with no shirt on and both shoes missing.

Fuuuuucccckkkkk.

So I managed to climb back up the ladder, back over the railing and walked back to the Sally Anne on Dunsmuir. Being drunk and without footwear I nearly killed myself in the process of climbing the Gondola ladder. I was screaming my lungs off as I walked through Stanley Park. I couldn’t believe how much of a fucking loser I was. I had the perfect opportunity to kill myself and my childish fears of what Richard would say after my death stopped me.

To this day I still don’t know why I feared Richard as much as I did. It made absolutely no sense. I should have hated him. But I didn’t. I feared him.

Anyways, the reason I know the exact date is that on Monday June 13th, 1994 I ended up at St. Paul’s Hospital. I could barely breath. I was coughing up blood and thick brown / green phlegm. The diagnoses was that I had come down with a bad case of community acquired pneumonia. The doctors had asked me if I had done anything out of the ordinary over the last week, if I had been anywhere unusual. Nope was my answer.

I felt like a fucking idiot.

In between 1994 and 2006 there were a few more attempts with the Skytrain, still couldn’t fucking do it.

The next time I would try to kill myself was in 2006. In August of 2006 I had called Richard and left some blistering messages on his cellphone. The next day he called me. I expected him to be angry. He wasn’t. He was quite shaken. I hadn’t really seen Richard since I moved away from Edmonton in February of 1992. Sure, I stopped in Edmonton in 2003 with my then girlfriend, but Richard barely had the time to speak to me. In my messages I had told him that I was sick and fucking tired of being blamed for what P.S. had done, I was tired of being blamed for having fucked with his military career, I was sick of everything. He knew that I was working at the hospital since the year previous as I had called him for his birthdate and my mother’s birthdate so that I could get my birth certificate replaced as the hospital needed to have a copy for my personnel file. He knew my phone number. He knew my address. But not fucking once did he ever call to see how I was making out.

So out of frustration I called him and vented into his voicemail. I was surprised when he called. I was even more surprised when it sounded like he was scared, like he had been wounded. He told me that yes, he had probably over reacted to what P.S. did ( yes, he used P.S.’s name). He didn’t mean to blame me, but that things were hectic back then. I was the older brother. I was supposed to look out for Scott. He pleaded with me to understand that he didn’t hire P.S.. He told me that he told his mother that he didn’t want P.S. around the house but that grandma kept hiring P.S.. And if I was to be angry at anyone for what P.S. had done, I should be angry at my grandmother for hiring P.S..

Things were great for about two months after this. Richard would call me on a daily basis. He even mailed me a $100 gift certificate to the Old Spaghetti Factory for my birthday. For him to tell the CFNIS in 2011 that he didn’t know how to get hold of me was a fucking crock of shit.

Anyways, just after my birthday the calls started to drop off.

By November he wasn’t calling or returning my calls.

Not a word at Christmas.

So I had decided to jump in front of a Skytrain.

Again I chickened the fuck out.

This was the last time I had ever been in a hospital.

But this hasn’t been the end of my desire to die.

As I’ve said in other posts, in the early 2000’s I had become aware of what was then called “assisted suicide” in Europe. Towards the late ’00s I had heard that in some European countries that depression was an acceptable reason to seek “medical suicide”. I knew that I would never have the money to make it over to Europe. And then the unthinkable started to happen. Jurisdictions across North America started to warm up to the idea of assisted suicide.

Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Health reasons is so close that I can almost taste the propofol in my tongue. March 2023 to be exact.

Whether or not I have what it takes to pass the “test” to be allowed to die peacefully in my bed without any violence inflected upon my body remains to be seen.

North America has a puritanical streak in which it is believed that everyone must suffer right to the end for a death to be righteous.

I haven’t enjoyed a single fucking day in my life since Canadian Forces Base Namao. Society tells me that I am a fucking loser for wanting to die. Society tells me that I am selfish and only hurting others with my desire to die.

Society tells me that I don’t value the special and unique life that I have been “given”.

I sure as fuck didn’t ask for this. I didn’t tell Richard to fuck Marie so that I could be born.

I didn’t ask for my father to be a rage prone alcoholic in the Canadian Armed Forces.

I didn’t ask for my mother to leave.

I didn’t ask for my grandmother to hire P.S.

I didn’t ask to be molested by P.S. and Captain McRae.

I didn’t ask for my brain to be fucked with by Captain Terry Totzke.

I didn’t ask for my father to be a spineless wimp that followed along with the desires of the Canadian Armed Forces.

I have no interests.

I have no hobbies.

I have no friends.

I have absolutely nothing.

People tell me that I have to live, that I simply have to find the reasons to live, that I’m not trying hard enough.

People tell me that I’m only trying to get attention, that I’m weak, that I’m ungrateful.

People tell me to “forget the past and move on”.

How the fuck does one simply forget what I’ve been through?

Why do I have to keep suffering so that others can feel like they’ve fixed me or cured me?

Trust me, I am angry about a lot of things, but I’m not angry about dying.

Everyone dies.

My death won’t be some unusual event that no other human being has experienced.

Four simple drugs administered via a PICC catheter into the superior vena cava of my heart and I can be freed of all of this dysfunctional shit that is my life.

Midazolam

Propofol

Rocuronium

Bupivacaine

All that I want is to die a little earlier than what the cosmos has planned for me so that I don’t have to live with CFB Namao playing on an endless loop inside my skull. Richard may be dead and gone, and yes it was very cathartic when I found out that he was dead, but his ridicule, his hatred, his loathing, and his depression live inside my skull. P.S. lives in my skull. The knowledge of what Captain McRae did to me after the wine lives inside of my skull. Going to “special school” is inside my skull. Being a grade 8 dropout who missed out on a multitude of opportunities lives in my skull.

Let me go.

Let me be at peace.

Let me be free of the things that I had no control over.

The secrets that cause me to suffer.

The Canadian Forces are adept at keeping secrets no matter who suffers.

As much as I love the final report issued by the Military Police Complaints Commission in 2020 in which the MPCC gave a very subtle and discreet kick to Minister Harjit Sajjan’s balls there is one troubling aspect that has caused me concern.

It’s these pair of paragraphs in the final report.

Basically, the MPCC is stating that I was wrong to assume that the CFNIS were commanded by the Chain of Command to conduct the 2015 to 2018 portion of investigation GO 2011-5754 in such a manner as to not risk exposing in the present day what the Canadian Armed Forces tried to bury in 1980.

Yes, technically the Military Police Complaints Commission is correct in the sense that Captain McRae’s court martial was reported in the media. But lets’ see what was actually in the media versus what happened on the base.

“McRae has been sentenced to four years for buggery with ->A<- child”

In 1980 the Canadian media reported that Captain Father Angus McRae had committed buggery with “A” child. Not 2 children. Not 3 children. Not 10 children. Not 25 children.

ONE FUCKING CHILD.

Not 25 children between the ages of 5 and 15.

ONE FUCKING CHILD.

And that child was P.S..

The only child over the age of 14.

In September of 2002, the Departmental Public Affairs Office (DGPA-DPAPO) of the Department of Justice, which was representing the Department of National Defence and the Minister of National Defence, made edits to a press release that was going to be the Government of Canada’s response to the $4.5 million dollar action brought by P.S..

Why would the Government of Canada strike the words “Buggery”, “Gross Indecency”, and “Indecent Assault” while leaving the offence numbers 155, 156, 157?

My guess is that simple numbers are meaningless.

Don’t forget, in the early 2000’s, male child sexual abuse was finally being acknowledged. Prior to the mid ’90s and early 2000s it really wasn’t accepted that boys could be the victims of sexual assault.

And in 2002, the Criminal Code that was current in effect was the 1985 Criminal Code of Canada. Not the 1970 Criminal Code. If someone wanted to know what sections 155, 156, and 157 were and they grabbed a copy of the 1985 criminal code they’d really be confused as in the 1985 Criminal Code section 155 was Incest, section 156 was language dealing with offences committed prior to 1983, and section 157 was repealed.

Only if someone was really determined and went to a local law court library and got their hands on a copy of the 1970 Criminal Code would one be able to determine that sections 155, 156, and 157 related to Gross Indecency, Indecent Assault, and Buggery.

And even though the military police and the CFSIU in 1980 knew that as many as 25 children were being sexually abused by Captain McRae and that the military was aware that Captain McRae had confessed during his ecclesiastical to having molested boys for many years meaning that Captain McRae had more than likely molested children on Canadian Forces Base Kington, Canadian Forces Base Portage La Prairie, Canadian Forces Station Holberg, in addition to the 25 children he molested on Canadian Forces Base Namao, the Department of Justice was still going with Captain McRae having only molested “one” boy.

The Department of Justice even went so far as to note that the Canadian Forces had found Captain McRae guilty in a court martial and had subsequently kicked Captain McRae out of the military.

But the Department of Justice made no mention that many of the charges that the military police and the CFSIU had ready to go against Captain McRae had been dismissed by the chain of command prior to Captain McRae’s court martial.

The Department of Justice also fails to note in their press release that unlike in the modern day where charges have to be referred to a prosecutor, in the days of Captain McRae’s court martial it was Captain McRae’s commanding officer, base commander Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, that would determine during a summary investigation which charges would proceed and which charges would be dismissed and not a military prosecutor.

In 1980 Brigadier General Daniel Edward Munro was Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, base commander of Canadian Forces Base Namao and Commanding Officer of Captain Father Angus McRae.

As Legislative Summary LS-311E (1998) indicates, it was Colonel Munro that determined the charges against Captain McRae.

As the Judge Advocate General indicated in 2018, it would be impossible to bring charges against Brigadier General Daniel Edward Munro if it was found that he had acted improperly in 1980 and had committed the Criminal Code offence of “Obstruction of Justice”. And even if Daniel Edward Munro had just been following the orders of his superiors, the same 3-year-time-bar would apply to them.

To this date the Canadian Forces are very happy to leave things in the past.

So, with all of this bullshit and all of the subterfuge and all of the lies is it any wonder that I’ve grown very tired?

When I went to the Edmonton Police Service in 2011 to lay charges against P.S. I honestly thought that I stood a decent chance of getting justice. And if I got justice then there was no way that my father was going to be able to keep blaming me for what I had allowed P.S. to do to my younger brother. My father would have to apologize for the way he had treated me in the aftermath of the P.S. / Captain McRae fiasco on CFB Namao.

The Canadian Forces and their defective investigation agency stole that away from me.

The court martial transcripts from McRae’s court martial, the CFSIU investigation paperwork, and what retired Warrant Officer Frederick R. Cunningham had told me on November 27th, 2011, all indicate that the military police in 1980 knew what P.S. had done. But the 2011 investigation was a big nothing burger.

My old man died and got off scot-free. He’ll never have to apologize and explain his part in this horrid mess.

And I’m the one who is stuck with having to request Medical Assistance in Dying for mental health issues when it becomes legal in March of 2023 to erase all of the memories of 1978 through 1987 and 2011 to the present day.

Pot, Kettle, Black.

A tale of two different Access to Information requests.

On Tuesday April 12th, 2022 as I sat in my apartment being examined via ZOOM by the defence counsel for the defendant, counsel asked me a question based upon my foster care records from the Alberta Government.

Counsel’s assistant did a screen share and an image similar to this image appeared on my screen:

I had seen this document before. This was the interview of my father by Judith James, a psychologist that had been hired by the Canadian Armed Forces to evaluate my family after our school teachers and our principal complained to the military social worker about the issues my brother and I were having in school immediately after we arrived at CFB Griesbach from CFB Namao.

Confidential – Parent Interview
Re: Robert and (my brother) Gill

I met with Richard on Nov. 6 1980 to discuss the level of emotional distress demonstrated by his sons Robert and (my brother). <blank> Richard acknowledged and confirmed many of the family problems cited by Robert and (my brother) <blank>.

What was new to me was the following text:

<blank> appeared concerned about <blank> drinking, suggesting <blank> emotionally abusive towards both children, especially when inebriated. As well, <blank> suggested that <blank> attempts to undermine any closeness between <blank> and <blank> by telling them false stories.

After the meeting was over I searched my copy of my foster care records, but I couldn’t find this paragraph anywhere. I found the page, but the section where this paragraph should have been was redacted.

This paragraph would have been devastating if it had been included in the copy of my foster care records that were released to me in 2011. As it is, I am so emotionally numb and dead now that this paragraph is nothing more than an amusing curiosity.

Let me fill in the blanks to the best of my ability based on some basic assumptions.

<Richard> appeared concerned about < Margaret’s> drinking, suggesting <she was> emotionally abusive towards both children, especially when inebriated. As well, <Richard> suggested that <Margaret> attempts to undermine any closeness between <him> and <his sons> by telling them false stories.

Fuck me Richard you stupid fucking asshole.

Both Richard and my grandmother drank excessively.

When they both got shitfaced, which was often, they’d stay up all night drinking and then spend the next day passed out. After that came the hangover phase. You didn’t want to be around either of these two when they were recovering from a hangover.

And yes, this all occurred on an active Canadian Armed Forces base in the Private Married Quarters on that base. And no, my father wasn’t the only alkie in a Canadian Forces uniform back then.

It was probably a very good thing that Richard was seldom living with us on Canadian Forces Base Namao. I couldn’t really imagine living in a house with these two drinking each other under the table any chance they got.

For Richard to tell Judith James in November of 1980 that he was concerned about his mother’s drinking is fucking hilarious.

As much as Richard despised his mother, he needed his mother to look after my brother and I while he was off playing G.I. Fucking Joe in the Canadian Forces for weeks and months at a time.

There are three DUIs that I clearly remember. One from CFB Shearwater, one from CFB Summerside, and one from CFB Namao.

There were all of the times he’d come home from the base mess three sheets to the fucking wind and he’d wake me and my brother up and keep us up at night to keep him company when he was drinking.

There was the yelling and hollering that he’d do when he was well past the point of intoxicated. When Richard was like this on Summerside and Namao there was absolutely no sleeping for my brother and I.

Grandma would do similar things when she’d get drunk. Luckily she didn’t have a driver’s licence, so we never had to worry about being in the car with her when she was drunk.

It was Richard’s drinking and abusive behaviour that led to my mother leaving and Grandma being brought in to look after my brother and I.

It was Grandma’s drinking that led to my brother and I needing to be babysat by P.S..

They were both alcoholics more in love with the bottle than the children they were supposed to look after.

So all I can say is “FUCK YOU RICHARD!”.

What a pathetic excuse of a man you were.

Blaming your own mother’s alcoholism for the problems your own children were exhibiting when your alcoholism was just as fucking bad.

And when I tell you that there was absolutely no one that my brother or I could tell about the abuse, I mean, there was no body that we could tell. The two adults in our lives were damaged beyond all hope.

Vagina vs. Penis.

The battle of the sexes has some really bad side effects.

One thing that everyone should take into consideration with male child sexual abuse is the general perception the public has that as boys have penises, they can only be perpetrators, not victims.

Take the crime of buggery for example. Buggery was the offence of anal intercourse with another male. As the law was written, buggery was a victimless crime. Both parties were seen as being guilty. And the age difference between the parties didn’t matter.

In May of 1980 Captain David Pilling of Canadian Forces Base Namao requested that Warrant Officer Frederick R. Cunningham investigate Captain Father Angus McRae for having committed “Acts of Homosexuality ” with teenaged boys on the base. This came as a result of an investigation military police officers Mossman and Clark had initiated against 14 year old P.S. as a result of numerous parents on the base complaining about P.S.’s inappropriate actions with younger children on the base.

This would have also been about the time I had been caught being fucked in the ass by P.S. in the bedroom of his family PMQ. And as the court martial transcripts indicate for Captain McRae’s court martial, P.S. had been caught trying to bugger some boys in the “horse shoe” forest behind the rec centre and he had already been sent for psychological treatments due to his attractions to younger boys.

“Acts of homosexuality” is a very curious phrase, is it not?

But, that’s the way things “were back then”.

Boys have penises.

Boys can only be perpetrators.

Boys cannot be the victim.

This is why Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke was adamant that the issues I was exhibiting in October of 1980 were due to a mental illness that I had that he called “homosexuality”. It was because of this illness that he told me that he had the base military police watching me.

I have no doubt in my mind that Captain Totzke’s insistence that I was a homosexual contributed not only to my father, master corporal Richard Gill’s treatment of me, but also contributed grossly to my sexual and gender confusion throughout my life.

I wasn’t a victim of P.S.

I wasn’t a victim of Captain McRae.

I was a homosexual who had allowed P.S. to stick his penis into my ass of my own free will. Sure, okay, I was only 7 and 8 and he was 14 when P.S. was abusing me, but that’s not the point, right?

I have a penis. P.S. has a penis. If I didn’t want P.S. to do to me what he did, then I just had to say for him to stop. But because I didn’t stand up to him and stop him from abusing me or from abusing my brother, I’m just as equally to blame.

When I was being examined by Earl’s defence counsel for discovery prior to the setting of Earl’s criminal trial date this is the line of argument that was used. It wasn’t that I was terrified of my father finding out that I was still engaged in “homosexual behaviour”. I willingly had sex with a man that was older than my father because I was gay, a homosexual, and I wanted to have sex with him.

It was even implied that the because I was over the age of consent that I had obviously consented to the abuse.

Even today things really haven’t much changed from back then.

If you have a penis and you’re being affected by abuse that occurred 40 years ago, you’re just being a melodramatic crybaby who simply won’t grow up.

The counselling available for men today basically consists of “manning up” and admitting that the abuse was nowhere near as bad as it could have been if you were a girl.

Look at it this way. A 30 year old male school teacher has sexual intercourse with a 15 year old female student and everyone is calling for the teacher’s head on a pike. A 30 year old female school teacher has sexual intercourse with a 15 year old male student and everyone is patting the student on the back for being such a lucky horn dog.

A 15 year old male student gets abused by his 30 year old male school teacher and he’s seen as a queer, a homo, a fag, or a cocksucker.

And in our society it really doesn’t seem to matter the age of the abused. If the victim has a penis they were obviously a very willing participant in the “homosexuality”.

I’ll have more to say on this starting Wednesday after my final examination by the defence counsel for the Commissionaires on Tuesday.

Now, of course I know that this is all bullshit. But I only started to realize this when I was in my 30s.

What didn’t help though was having Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajan call me a liar to my face insinuating that I “had an angle” and that I was “playing games”. You could see from the look in his eyes that he had absolute contempt for males that allowed themselves to be sexually abused.

Minister of National Defence Anita Anand hasn’t been much better. She’s only allowed sexual assault investigations involving women to be handed off to the outside civilian police agencies. She is allowing my investigation to stay with the CFNIS. She obviously shared the same mindset that Harjit Sajjan has, that males cannot be sexually abused, and even if they are, it’s not really a crime. The two investigators currently looking after my matter have said that when they go talk to the witness in this matter, that they’re going to tell the witness that if he talks to them that he will be subject to arrest for the Criminal Code offence of “child kidnapping”. These two really don’t want it discovered that at age 8 I gave a blow job to a major of the Canadian Armed Forces. Why should the reputation of the Canadian Armed Forces get smeared because I was a cocksucking homosexual at the age of 8?

And discovering in 2020 in the final report of the Military Police Complaints Commission report that the CFNIS in 2011 knew full well about the connection between P.S., Captain McRae, and that the investigation into Captain McRae was started because the military police in 19 fucking 80 knew damn well what P.S. had being doing with children between the ages of 5 and 10 on Canadian Forces Base Namao made me realize that male victims of child sexual abuse are not seen as victims, just “societal malcontents with axes to grind against the military*”.

And it’s this indifference towards the male victims of child sexual abuse in our fake, phoney, bullshit strewn, conformist, and hyper masculinized society that leads many victims of male child sexual abuse to kill themselves.

(* yes, in 2011 the CFNIS implied this when they interviewed another of the potential victims of P.S.)

Escitalopram.

The pros and cons of messing with my mind.

So, I’ve been on escitalopram for seven months now.

It has been both a blessing and a curse.

It looks like escitalopram will be with me for the rest of my life.

The pros are:

Far less depression. It’s not that I am happy. It’s that my emotions are completely blunted. And trust me, blunting is better than nothing.
My anxiety has been turned down. I can still feel the anxiety, but it doesn’t destroy me like it did before.
Disrupted trains of thoughts don’t cause headaches or nausea.

The cons are:

Disturbed sleep patterns.
Day long sleepiness.
Acne the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was a teen.
A general sense of ennui.
Weight gain.
Loss of appetite.
Can’t orgasm, but sex has never been a major deal breaker in my life.

So far, the benefits of escitalopram outweigh the negatives.

No. The escitalopram hasn’t caused increased thoughts of suicide or suicidal ideations.

But it also hasn’t taken away my desire to die.

The one thing that I have realized, and that you’re going to have to realize, is that the 40 years of untreated depression and anxiety have done some long term damage to my brain. And I’m okay with that. Not that the damage was done to my brain, but the fact that my brain is damaged.

40 years is a very long time to go without treatment.

So here I am, riding out the last few years of my life, and writing about it as I go.

By March of 2023 year we should know what the Parliamentary committee will recommend for guidelines for those wishing to apply for Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Health issues.

After that I’ll have to apply. This will probably consist of convincing 3 psychologists that I am of sound mind in making this choice.

Just recently my N.P. has realized that I am serious. He’s the one who set me up with the escitalopram. I guess that he was hoping that the escitalopram would fix things for me. But it hasn’t. It can’t.

No matter how often my father passed my issues off as being nothing more than my attempts at attracting attention. They weren’t.

Just because my father chose to ignore my issues, and refused to get me timely treatment, doesn’t make his opinion that I was just making things up any more valid than the diagnoses that I had been given early in life.

The fact that my father loved to blame my issues on my mother and her “insane brothers” doesn’t make what I’ve suffered for the last 40 years a trivial matter.

If my father and Captain Totzke had allowed the ticking time bombs of depression, anxiety, and CPTSD to have been diffused all those years ago things would have worked out completely different.

Time machines do not exist. There is no going back into the past to undo things.

Again, to be very clear, wanting to die is nothing new. My wish to die has been with me since CFB Namao.

No one can live through that type of shit and not want to die.

I know of two men who died by suicide as a result of the CFB Namao affair. And as I’ve only met a few people who were affected by the CFB Namao affair, I have no idea how many others have ever tried suicide or have ever succeeded at suicide.

And I know of many more men who have committed suicide later in life, even after they have received “justice” for what they endured.

Bobbie, you just need some hobbies.

No. No I don’t. Hobbies won’t stop the memories of CFB Namao or my treatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke from popping up.

Cycling! You love to ride your bicycle. Yes, yes I do love riding my bicycle. However I can’t ride my bicycle 24 hours a day seven days a week.

Electronics! Take a course in electronics. I never really liked electronics. Learning electronics was one way that I thought that I could get closer to my ever distant father. That was a bad strategy.

Cars! You loved cars! You owned a car! Actually I’ve always been terrified of cars. I hate being in cars. I got a membership at the base autoclub on Canadian Forces Base Downsview as I thought that my father and I could spend time together at the base auto club. Again, another one of my very wrong ideas.

I really hated the idea of working on other people’s cars after the night my brother and his buddy Greg brought a 6 cylinder Chevy up to Bob Beckers workshop with the idea that I could make the car run again after Greg and his buddies had pulled all the plugs, the wires, the distributor and other things off the engine.

I forget who all was there. There was my brother, Greg, an older guy in his 40s named Dom, and two older teens that had to be about 19 or 20.

Greg at the time was no small kid. Even though Greg and my brother were both younger than I was, both were physically larger than me in both mass and height. My brother at the time was so large that my father wouldn’t dare raise a hand to him.

Two thing about that night really pissed me off.

The first was that I moved Bob’s van outside so that Greg and his buddies could push the car in. When Bob’s van was outside someone just happened to steal Bob’s mobile phone from the van. Fuck was Bob ever pissed with me. And no, it wasn’t some rando walking by that stole the mobile phone.

The second thing that pissed me off was that even though I told Greg that I hadn’t worked on anything other than 4 cylinder Volkwagen engines, he was going with what my brother had told him, that I could work on anything and that if I didn’t fix his engine it was because I was being selfish and stuck up and a self centred asshole.

Greg and his buddies ended up taking the car away that evening.

Greg and his buddies caught up with me a few days later.

They beat the sweet fucking jesus out of me in the parking lot of the laundromat on Keele street. All I really remember about that night is two of Greg’s friends holding me down while Greg stomped on my head. I could barely walk after. I headed over to Billy Bee donuts on Wilson Ave. The owner of the donut shop wanted me to go to the hospital to get looked at seeing as how my eyes were getting bloodshot.

But yeah, that’s one of the reasons that I will never work on anyone’s car for any reason. And there are similar reasons as to why I don’t fix any thing electronic anymore or why I don’t really do much with computers.

Well, today was interesting

Today I was interviewed by the lawyer for the defence.

Today was interesting.

Thankfully I’m on escitalopram. I’d hate to think how today would have turned out if I was my good ol’ self.

Being depressed and suffering from severe anxiety means that today would have been an absolute nightmare if I wasn’t medicated.

Sorry to say, but I can’t discuss anything that was discussed today. Not even supposed to discuss the evidence presented today with my lawyer who was also present during the examination.

Yesterday was interesting.

Yesterday was the first “in office” visit with my nurse practitioner since the start of the pandemic back in March of 2020.

My N.P. is the one who set me up with escitalopram last year when my brain started to seriously crack.

So yesterday was the first time that I had seriously talked to him about medical assistance in dying. We had talked on the phone various times over the last year as he was doing monthly check-ins to see how I was doing and we would discuss M.A.i.D..

However I was in person this time and we had a much better conversation. I explained to him why counselling couldn’t or wouldn’t work for me. No civilian counsellor would understand the mess I went through as kid. And no civilian counsellor or even a military counsellor would be able to sweep the crap out of my brain.

The damage is there, the damage is permanent, and the damage isn’t simply going away.

And no, I don’t want to learn how to live with it. I’ve lived with it long enough.

But I am getting way ahead of myself. I still don’t know what the specific criteria will be. And those criteria won’t be released until March 2023.

So, we’ll have to wait and see.

I’ve also had the opportunity to start shooting pictures in RAW mode with my camera.

I know, large jump from death to cameras, but hey, what the heck.

Movieland Arcade — RAW image converted to PNG.

RAW images are interesting in the sense that they can be truly manipulated. These images in RAW are the actual data unprocessed from the sensor.
These images have not been processed or compressed.
This RAW image is converted to PNG just for the sake of being able to be uploaded to my blog. The PNG format does have some compression.

If you have a Mac or an image program capable of viewing RAW files, here is the original RAW image.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/imnb8frl603f3u6/DSC03189.ARW?dl=0

Anyways, enough for now.

Empty on the inside

“What do you like to do Bobbie?”

“What are your interests?”

“You must have hobbies”

“What music do you like?”

“What do you and your friends like to do?”

The truth is that I don’t actually have any interests, any hobbies, or any friends.

I don’t like TV.

There are very few movies that I like.

I don’t like electronics.

I understand electronics. But I don’t like dabbling in electronics.

I bought various electronic kits over the years. For example I used the Raspberry Pi for a bit, I’ve also used the Arduino kits. Setting them up and programming them is easy enough. There’s just nothing inside of me that gives me any joy programming these devices.

I don’t like computers.

I can use computers. Computers are a tool just like any other tool. I can set them up. I can use them for writing reports. I can scan and archive. But I really don’t care for computers.

When my brother came to visit last year he said that he was sure that I liked cars. Nope. I understand how they work. I can work on them. But I don’t like them.

Music. I really had no interest until I was in my 20s. This I think was due to the way Richard belittled me for any interest that I had shown in music at school. Throw into that the fact that Earl Ray Stevens had used my desired to learn how to play drums as a way to sexually abuse me.

Also, as a form of punishment for causing our relocation from CFB Griesbach to CFB Downsview, Richard had thrown out my stereo, my records, and my 8-track tapes as punishment. This was a record collection that Uncle Doug, grandma, and my weekend job at Pizza Plus had allowed me to build. It wasn’t large. Maybe about twenty or thirty albums and 45s. The 8-tracks were mostly Uncle Doug’s. I was 11 when Richard threw out my stereo. The stereo had belonged to grandma, and it was mine when we moved from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach. Uncle Doug bought grandma a new stereo system for her bedroom.

When we were younger and living on Canadian Forces Base Downsview, my brother always accused me of picking on him and making fun of the groups that he listened to. Even when I went up to Edmonton in 2013 and saw him over the summer he quizzed me to see if I knew the songs he was playing. And then he told me that he was always ashamed to sing along with his bands because I used to “tease him” when we were younger.

Tease him? Nope. I was going to Junior High in the period of ’84 through ’87. Poison, Cinderella, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, et. al. were standard fare at school and on the radio. I liked Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Slade, Queensryche, all the way to Supertramp, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Peter Gabriel. So, it wasn’t that I didn’t like his music, or that I thought his music sucked. What I deeply despised him for was that he could play his music at any volume in his bedroom and neither Richard nor Sue would give a flying fuck. If I turned my music up above barely audible, Richard would fly off the fucking handle. My brother was allowed to have a stereo. I had to scrap together a used stereo out of a van. So yeah, there was some angst created there. I don’t know if Richard intentionally created this rivalry, or if he was just so fucking stupid that he didn’t realize what he was creating. What my brother also seems to forget is that Richard would make non-stop snide comments about the music we listened to. The comments didn’t seem to have much impact on my brother. It was like he was oblvious to Richard’s contempt. For some reason I was super sensitive to Richard’s snide comments and his put downs. C’est la vie I guess.

I think my lack of interest in TV comes down to two things.

The first was having a stunted imagination as a child. After the events on CFB Namao, and after being involved with Captain Terry Totzke, and with my father’s reaction to the events on CFB Namao, any imagination I had as a child was killed. Richard’s demeaning comments and his frequent sarcastic putdowns would kill the imagination in just about everyone he came in contact with. But the weird thing was he loved the original Star Trek, he loved the original Dr. Who, he loved Bug Bunny, and he loved the Batman TV series. I’ll never figure him out. He’s dead and gone. All I can put it down to is his self centred perspective and his superiority complex.

The second was that Sue would insist that we play outside which was fine with me as on Downsview I was mostly heading off to work at my after school jobs. On Griesbach things were a little worse as I only had my weekend job at Pizza Plus so week nights were spent wandering around North Edmonton no matter what the weather was like, and yeah, Edmonton can be quite cold in the winter.

So yeah, I’ve never really formed an attraction to TV.

When I met up with my brother last year, we went for a long walk around the seawall. He wanted to talk about whether or not I was really serious about wanting to undergo medical assistance in dying. I assured him that I was very serious about this and I explained to him why as well as my justifications for wanting to die.

I don’t know if he honestly believes that I was a psychiatrically fucked up as I was, or if Richard’s frequent assertions that I was just “acting up to get attention” have made it impossible for him to understand.

As we walked around the seawall we talked about other things, such as my skills with fixing cars. We ended up on the topic of electronics. He wanted to know why I wasn’t more involved with electronics. I told him that I was never very good at electronics to begin with, and that as I had no diploma in electronics any skills that I had were nothing more than a “hobby”. He replied that I had built so many things as a kid that he was sure that I liked electronics.

I told him that the one time it became very crystal clear to me that electronics was never to be in the cards for me was when I was in grade 8 and I had put together a helium-neon laser for science fair. I had salvaged the parts out of a couple of old Pioneer Video Laserdisc players. Mr. Bowles, my grade 8 science teacher was very impressed with the project and my writeup of how ionizing gas laser tubes worked. My father was pissed off because Mr. Bowles called my father at work to try to convince him that I should enter my project at the National Science Fair in Ottawa. My brother replied to me that I didn’t really build that laser, I just took it from a laserdisc player.

****insert abrupt vinyl record scratch noise here***

Narrator: It was at this point that Bobbie realized that maybe he was wrong, that maybe there was an afterlife, and that his dysfunctional father had risen from the grave and had gained control of his brother’s vocal cords in order to issue insults from beyond the grave.

Yeah, that was Richard’s thing back then. That I was just too fucking stupid to make anything on my own. That I was too fucking dumb to do anything with my life. That I was a liar. That I was fucking insane like my mother. That I had fucked with his military career.

And sure, it’s true the parts came from two non-functional video laserdisc players. But it took me picking the parts out of two players to make one functional 5mw helium-neon laser. These lasers, because of how much energy they emitted were under very strict control of the laserdisc player CPU. This meant that the laser power supply had to be modified to allow the laser to start and run without the CPU controlling it.

I had also built from scratch the twin 20watt push-pull power amplifiers that would drive the radial and tangential correction mirrors that I had repurposed into scanning mirrors. I could feed audio into the amplifiers and have the laser make patterns on the wall. I could feed the output of a frequency generator into the amplifier and make shapes on the wall. I could even feed the analog X-Y signals from an old Vectrex video game into the amplifier and play vector scan graphic video games on the wall. Was quiet messy though as I couldn’t figure out how to blank the beam.

It was basically Richard belittling and ridicule of my electronics skills that made me turn my back on electronics.

The final knife in my back came a few years later when I was servicing arcade games, pinball machines, and jukeboxes. I would have been around 16. The company that I worked for, Rainbow Games, had a Championship Sprint game in the shop that their technician couldn’t fix. This technician had a diploma from DeVry and a diploma from ITT Tech. He had been working on the game for weeks and couldn’t solve the problem. They were about to give up on this machine and scrap it for parts. I went through the schematics, went through the error codes list, and found that the problem was caused by a faulty 8-bit bi-directional latch on the data bus between the mother board and the graphics processor board. It took me two days to do what this DeVry / ITT tech trained technician couldn’t do. Hey Bruce, hey Ed, can I get a pay raise seeing as how I’m fixing more equipment than Len. Nope, sorry Rob, but you’re not a certified technician, it wouldn’t be right for us to pay you more without a diploma.

So, that drove the final nail into the coffin of my interest in electronics.

Computers honestly were never a thing for me.

So…… what are my interests?

Nothing.

Really.

I have no interests or desires.

I think that the depression that I inherited from Richard also explains why Richard was the way he was. He really didn’t have any interests either. What he had though was a gun pointed at his head. He had to learn avionics / aeroframe mechanics / electronics / computers if he wanted to be able to stay in the Canadian Forces. When Richard joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at the age of 17 with a grade 8 education and a remark from the enrolment officer stating that Richard was developing into a bit of a “rebel” in school, the Navy was more than happy to accept people like Richard. As the years went by though, the requirements to enlist went up and the expectations placed on the currently enlisted went up as well.

Richard’s education level is debatable. When I examined him for federal court in 2013, he claimed that he had grade nine. His enrolment records into the military also say grade nine. However, when I met Marie in 2013 I asked her how Richard and she met. She said that her brother, my uncle Al, and Richard had both attended the same grade 9 remedial program in Nova Scotia before they were allowed to join. Either Richard’s grade nine marks were too low to meet the requirements, or he only completed some of his grade nine.

By the time I tried to enlist when I was 18 grade 10 was the absolute minimum and there weren’t many trades in the military open with that minimal qualification. Grade 12 was preferred. And university or college was desired.

I don’t think that my father really had an interest in electronics or computers as his depression wouldn’t allow for it. My father did have the ability to learn electronics and computers, but that was mainly so that he could save his career in the military. In the ’70s and the ’80s there really wasn’t much need for a unilingual anglophone with a grade nine education.

I know first hand just how crushing depression can be, especially major depression.

Where did Richard’s sarcasm, his pettiness, and his desire to mock and ridicule come from? That I will never know. With my depression I’ve never felt the desire to ridicule or mock anyone. I just want to be left alone when I hit one of my crushing depressions. I know that grandma could be cruel. But I don’t remember her as ever being the type to mock or into ridicule. She was a very authoritarian type person who loved to discipline. I don’t know when exactly Arthur Herman Gill left grandma. I remember that Richard and his father were not close at all. Is that where Richard picked up his need to ridicule and mock? I don’t know when exactly Roy William Anderson and grandma hooked up. I honestly don’t remember much of Andy as he was only with us a short time before he slipped in the bathtub and suffered severe brain damage. Was Andy married to my grandmother when Richard was young? Did Andy mock and ridicule Richard?

Not my concern where Richard got his issues from.

What is my concern is that Richard, his defective parenting skills, his depression, his sarcasm, his need to feel superior, his need to ridicule, and his need to mock left a trail of destruction in his path.

And that is why I mainly feel completely void and empty and for the most part worthless.

And please, I’m not trying to be rude, but don’t try to cheer me up. Compliments are the hardest thing for me to accept. You could say that I have major trust issues. And when I was young, compliments were a way that people got their hands into my pants, or got me to do things for them.

So, as truthful as you may be with your compliments, my trust issues are burnt so deeply into my brain that I will never be able to accept a compliment without assuming that you’re buttering me up for something.

And trust me, it’s not you.

It’s me.

I know that.