Before going to Iceland in June of 2023 I had never been outside of North America. When I moved to Vancouver in 1992 I had started going down to Seattle every now and again.
Prior to that, and including all of the years that I lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario, I had never gone down to New York or even the American side of Niagara Falls.
Actually, I was over the American border once, but that was when I was on a job in the spring of 1990 and I had a stop over in the town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick. I had gone over the bridge into Calais, Maine a couple of times just to see what things were like.
I landed in Iceland a few days before the summer solstice in 2023.
I was in Iceland for just over a week.
Why did I go?
I had been expecting to be able to apply for medical assistance in dying back on March 17th, 2023 and going to Iceland was on my bucket list of things that I wanted to do before I kicked off this mortal coil.
Well, of course the Government of Canada chickened out at the last minute, so I’m still trapped here.
Why was Iceland on my bucket list?
Well, I talked about this before, but I’ll touch on it here again.
In 1976 my father had been posted from Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Nova Scotia to Canadian Forces Base Summerside on Prince Edward Island. His drinking and his physical abuse of my mother started to get out of hand.
In the winter of 1977 my father had my mother booted out of the military housing. My father then had his mother come in from Edmonton, Alberta to live in the PMQ and raise my brother and I as he was frequently away from home on exercises.
By the late spring of 1978 my grandmother had returned back to Edmonton.
In July of 1978 I had been found unconscious in the middle of the road due to an incident involving my bicycle. Someone had picked me up and driven me to the Prince County Hospital. The only next-of-kin listed was my father. My grandmother’s name wasn’t on the admission papers.
What was on that papers was this little curiosity:
Apparently it’s somewhat of a straight shot from CFB Summerside the to US Base in Iceland
So, being the curious type, I had to go see what was so great about Iceland.
It was an 8 hour flight from YVR to KEF.
It was an interesting week and a bit in Iceland.
Never did figure out why Richard went, must have just been a routine flight.
I mainly stayed in Reykjavik.
I couldn’t really see anyone that resembled me, so doesn’t look like my father made any pleasure stops while he was there.
I might go back in the winter of 2026 for the Winter Solstice.
Two more weeks of this and then I’ll be back at work.
Sleep, sleep, and more sleep……..
I know that I need to take vacation time, but vacation time is so unproductive.
I’ve never had much in the way of hobbies or interests. Travelling was never a big thing for me. I don’t have anything that I want to go see. I’m not really concerned with experiencing other cultures or customs.
Right now I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Nanaimo. Just spent a few days here. I come here periodically just to get away from the noise of Vancouver. I’ll be heading back in a few hours.
I’ve never been able to enjoy vacations.
Especially in my younger days my life derived so much of its meaning from work. I never felt comfortable not working or being away from work. It wasn’t that I was worried about being replaced. It’s just the my life is so empty that without work I feel even more empty.
Trust me, this isn’t what I wanted. But as I’ve alluded to previously, acceptance and respect were never found in my father’s house.
Actually, come to think about it. I don’t ever remember Richard taking any type of vacation time. The only time I can remember him taking time off was when he took Sue to Banff after they were married in 1982. And yes, even back in the days that I was growing up on the bases in Canada, members of the regular forces were entitled to annual vacation leave.
Makes me wonder now how many times he went on annual vacation, but called it a “training exercise” and just left Scott and I with Sue or grandma while he fucked off outta town. ‘Cause I certainly don’t ever remember him taking time off from the military for vacation.
One thing that I did notice in the current 2024 Canadian Forces Leave Policy Manual is a little blurb that members of the forces who are taking courses are recommended to take their vacation prior to the commencement of their courses due to the inability to take vacation during their course. I wonder how many of Richard’s 6 or 8 week courses at CFB Wainwright were actually 4 week or less courses, but he tacked on his vacation prior to the course so that he could get out of town and go hang out with his drinking buddies while leaving his kids at home for the women in his life to look after.
Anyways, yeah, there were no family vacations as kids. No travelling. No trips to the zoo. No trips to the museum. Nothing. Even when we lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario there weren’t even trips down to the States.
Well, time to go get something to eat before wandering over to catch the ferry back to Vancouver.
Back around the end of June in ’82 my father had borrowed a pickup truck with a camper in the bed from one of his buddies at 447 Sqn. so that he and his new wife, my stepmother, could go to Banff for their honeymoon.
Slide-in camper / Demountable camper.
They had no intention of taking Scott and I with them. We got unceremoniously dropped of with out mother in Calgary, AB. Yeah, the same mother that he told Alberta Social Services that had abandoned the family and that the same mother that he had told Alberta Social Services that he had no idea of how to contact.
When Richard and Sue were finished with their honeymoon they swung back through Calgary to pick Scott and I up. We drove back up to CFB Griesbach in Edmonton.
The truck was parked on the street in front of the PMQ.
Richard had gone somewhere and it was just Sue at home.
Scott got on top of the camper and stuffed the vents with leaves.
Just before Richard was due home Scott found me and told me that Richard was going to be pissed off with me for “me” having put the leaves into the vent on the camper.
I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, so I went to check out the camper.
I looked at the camper from the outside and I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, but once I opened the back door and climbed inside the camper I saw what he was talking about. The wind-up vent was plugged full of leaves. There was no way that Richard wasn’t going to notice this.
So, up on the roof I went.
Tim’s truck was a raised 4X4 with proper off road tires. With the camper on the back the roof had to be about 3 metres off the ground.
I got all of the leaves cleared out. It was spick and span.
I went to climb down the ladder and I lost my footing.
I landed on the ground flat on my back.
I had the wind knocked out of me and all I could see was stars.
It took so much effort to start to breathe again.
One of the locals came over and helped me up and walked me back to the PMQ where Sue was.
Sue sent me up to my room with the warning that Richard was not going to be happy when he got home.
When Richard got home he was none too pleased to find what had happened. The fact that I did something stupid that could get him in trouble with his commanding officer showed that I didn’t care about his military career.
The fact that I allowed Scott out of my sight meant that Scott could have fallen off the roof of the camper.
The fact that I wasn’t responsible enough to look after my brother meant thatI should take this as a lesson and learn from this.
My left wrist was burning. My right hand was swollen, numb, and immovable. But neither were anything compared to the headache and vomiting.
My father gave me some of his 222s to help me sleep.
Two days went by and then he took me to the Charles Camsell hospital in Edmonton to get my wrists looked at.
That’s when it was discovered that I wasn’t faking anything.
A couple of the larger bones in my right wrist were fractured. My left wrist had hairline fractures and was sprained.
The headaches and the vomiting had stopped by this point so I don’t think that Richard had mentioned anything to the doctors.
I can’t remember what Richard told the doctors, but I know he didn’t mention anything about falling off campers.
My left wrist got wrapped in a tensor. My right arm was set in a cast.
For illustrative purposes only
Did you know that it’s almost impossible to wipe your own ass when your dominant hand is set in an arm cast? My left arm wasn’t much use either. Hairlines are really super sensitive to force.
I wasn’t Sue’s kid, so that was out of the question. After Richard and Sue got married Sue wasted no time in telling Scott and I that we were to address her as Sue only that we were never to call her “mom” or refer to her as our “mother”. So yeah, wiping my ass wasn’t on her list of agreed upon tasks.
Richard only kept my brother and I because “it was cheaper than paying child support”. Wiping my ass was not very high on his list of priorities.
And as much as I feared my grandmother, she had moved out of the PMQ back in the spring of 1981. Walking from the PMQ at 10215 – 138 Ave over to my grandmother’s apartment at 10611 – 111th St. to get my butt wiped wasn’t in the cards.
Many creative ways were tried and tested to wipe my ass that didn’t involve using my hands.
The cast was only supposed to stay on my right arm for six weeks, but it ended up staying on for the entire summer as Richard insisted that this was the best way to teach me to not fuck around.
July 22nd, 1969 was 94 days prior to the worst peace time disaster in the Canadian Navy.
July 22nd, 1969 was when my father was photographed aboard Canada’s only French helicopter destroyer, the HMCS Ottawa.
He was a half Cree / half Irish boy from Fort McMurray.
He was born in Peterborough Ontario.
His father, Arthur Herman Gill abandoned grandma, so grandma packed up and moved back to Fort McMurray with Richard and his younger brother Doug in tow.
Richard attended a single room school house in Fort MacMurray.
Two of his three maternal uncles had been members of the Royal Canadian Army during WWII.
Jimmy Waniandy
Johnny Waniandy
George Waniandy
Trooper George Waniandy died in WWII in Italy. His brother John had been wounded in Italy as well.
Lance Corporal Jimmy Waniandy, a section commander, had been interviewed during the Korean war and been involved in stopping an attack.
Richard obviously had some pretty big shoes to fill.
As grandma lived with us from 1977 until 1981 I knew that she was an overbearing and domineering person.
In 1980, I had mentioned to a psychiatrist that I had been sent to for evaluation by military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that “my brain says that I’m going to kill myself unless grandma leaves the house”. My father would later tell Alberta Social Services that he blamed his mother for the issues my brother and I were having as she was “extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was intoxicated, which was frequent”.
I could see him volunteering to serve aboard the HMCS Ottawa to prove to his mother that he was just as good as George, Jimmy, and Johnny.
Just after the unification of the separate branches of the Canadian military into the Canadian Forces in 1968 he moved from the ships to the Sea King squadron on CFB Shearwater. The HMCS Ottawa was one of the Restigouche class destroyers that were converted to have a helicopter hangar. Richard could go to sea with his former shipmates on the HMCS Kootenay, but he would go with the prestigious submarine hunting Sea Kings. And even though he was with the Sea Kings, he could still go hit the local pubs and get shitfaced with his former navy buddies when the ships pulled into port.
And wouldn’t his mother ever be impressed with his ability to learn French? Learning French might also endear him to his wife who was part of the Dagenais clan from Province Quebec.
But, fast forward to October 23rd, 1969.
The HMCS Ottawa, HMCS Kootenay, HMCS Bonaventure, HMCS Saguenay, were amongst 10 ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom a few weeks prior as part of naval exercises and they were on their way back to Canada.
The HMCS Kootenay has just been instructed to fire its boilers up to full steam and the turbines had been ordered to full throttle.
Unfortunately the HMCS Kootenay had the original version of the Restigouche class reduction gearbox. This gearbox required that the bearings for the gear shafts to be installed in a particular direction to receive lubrication. The second version of the reduction gearbox allowed the bearings to be installed in either direction.
One bearing had been installed backwards and had starved for oil and was overheating. The stress of the full speed run didn’t help the situation.
The gears in those gearboxes were of the herringbone type. This design minimizes the axial loading on the shafts and gears, but leads to a large amount of oil shear which causes a large amount of vapourized / atomized oil.
This oil vapour came in contact with the red hot bearing and caused the vapour to ignite and then explode.
Three of the eight men killed in the explosion were friends of my father that he had served with.
The Sea Kings were called in to remove the injured off the Kootenay. This of course included the Sea King from the HMCS Ottawa.
It’s of no doubt that the HMCS Kootenay incident cooked my father’s noodle.
I can also see the Kootenay incident as sparking my father’s life long hatred of French. And I don’t mean he just didn’t want to speak French. Whenever the topic of French was brought up in the house, his full hatred came out. Even when I tried to practice French at home for school he would ridicule me for trying to learn French because French was, in his opinion, a complete fucking waste of time. Only fucking frogs spoke French was his constant refrain.
I can see his superiors on the HMCS Ottawa insisting to the point of complete idiocy that French and only French be spoken.
While my father’s drinking buddies were burning to death on the Kootenay I can see my father’s superiors yelling and gesticulating wildly “Arrêtez de parler anglais Gill! Nous parlons en Français sur ce navire”.
If that’s the one thing that I know about my father, he didn’t entertain “silly decisions by silly fuckers”.
Nothing screams Canadian Armed Forces like adhering to the “rules” during times of disaster, especially if the rules are petty and useless.
In 2014 I had returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia for the first time in my life since my father was posted to from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside in 1976. I met a man named Chris LeGier out by the HMCS Kootenay memorial at Point Pleasant.
He said something that stuck with me all these years later.
The Canadian Armed Forces turned their backs on everyone that was involved.
The military stuck to the rules regarding PMQs on the base in that the housing could only be rented to serving members of the military, not their spouses. Accordingly non-serving spouses were told to move out of the PMQs.
Members that had been traumatized by the events were ignored by the military. And this makes perfect sense because back in the day mental health issues were pretty well a one way ticket to civvy street.
According to Chris, it wasn’t unheard of for traumatized members of the HMCS Kootenay event to hit the bottle, use heroin, or even cocaine. And no, drug use in the Canadian Armed Forces wasn’t unheard of. And he said that it wasn’t just the members on the Kootenay that suffered. CFB Shearwater and CFB Halifax were a tight knit community and they all knew each other.
I had been going through searches on Newspapers.com when I came across a picture of my father from 1969.
The fact that Richard would have been a member of a ship’s company when that crew was expected to speak French at all times is fucking mind blowing to say the least.
He was a prairie boy growing up in Fort McMurray, AB before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at a stone frigate in Edmonton, AB. I can’t see him as ever having learnt French at home. When grandma came to live with us I can’t ever remember her speaking a single word of French, and I don’t think that she would have learnt French in the two years that she attended Indian Residential School.
When I was a kid, Richard had absolutely no time for French. Even though the schools on base were giving military dependents French classes, Richard would get upset if I tried speaking French in the PMQ.
The photo answers a bunch of questions. The HMCS Ottawa DDH 229 was fitted with a landing pad and a hangar for the Sea King helicopter. And the HMCS Ottawa was amongst the ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom and were involved with the HMCS Kootenay incident on October 23rd, 1969.
As Bill Parker had said to me in August of 1985 on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario, “I wish you had known your father before the Kootenay, he was a much different man then, I think you would have liked him”.
This photo was taken on July 22nd, 1969. That’s almost 3 months before the events of October 23rd, 1969 when the HMCS Kootney suffered a massive explosion due to overheated oil vapour in one of its reduction gearboxes. 9 men died that day, and according to Bill Parker in 1985, and my mother in 2013, three of those men were close friends of my father that he had served with in the Royal Canadian Navy before unification in 1968.
This photo was taken two years and two months before I was born. The man in the photo is not the man I grew up with. The man in the photo looks calm and inquisitive. The man that I grew up with was a piss tank alcoholic with rage issues and a hair temper trigger who had copious amounts of contempt for just about everyone else around him.
Looking at this photo I can only wonder what Richard would have been like had the HMCS Kootenay event not occurred. Or even if it had still occurred, I can only wonder what home life would have been like had the Canadian Armed Forces treated mental health as a priority instead of simply turning a blind eye to mental health issues and expecting the guys to deal with it on their own and self medicate through abusive behaviour, alcoholism, or hard drugs.
I know from my personal involvement with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that the mental health and wellbeing of military members was the least of the military’s concern.
Does seeing this photo make me change my opinion of my father.
No.
He was still a broken inconsiderate self centred man who should never have been allowed to father children.
But what this photo does show is that Bill Parker and my mother weren’t lying when they said that Richard was a completely different person before the HMCS Kootenay disaster.
Nice city. It’s walkable. But it’s also dominated by car culture.
Massive freeways all over the place.
It’s hard to get away from the car.
The downtown is nice and walkable.
Same homelessness and drug use issues that Seattle and Vancouver, BC have, but still no where near as bad as the drug problems in Edmonton, AB.
Did the usual thing, just walked around the city, steering clear of anything that looked like a tourist trap.
Came down here to buy socks.
Yep, socks.
Place down here sells nice cotton knee high and thigh high socks that come in an assortment of colours and patterns.
They work out to about $30/pr in Canada, but with Sir Misogyny the Orange wanting to start a trade tariff war, I thought that it would be a great time to pop on down for a long weekend to grab some socks and take advantage of the duty exemption that comes into play after one has been in the US of A for more than 48 hours.
There are a lot of these water fountains around the city. And it looks like they keep them running around the year.
Portlandia, a sculpture by Raymond Kaskey.
If you ever get to Portland, you gotta check the statute of Portlandia out. It’s perched over the entrance of the Portland Municipal Services Building located on S.W. 5th Ave., between S.W. Main St. and S.W. Madison St.
This city has a lot of bridges. 12 large bridges and a good half dozen pedestrian bridges.
Most of the bridges have a good coating of graffiti, stickers, and other colourful distractions from the banality of life.
My hotel room had one of these in it.
Kept waiting for the psychologist to come in to analyze me, but they never showed up.
And finally, no trip would be complete without me checking out the HVAC system in the hotel where I’m staying. Polished spiral duct. Long radius elbows. Looks like a variable flow refrigerant system so it can do heating and cooling. Easy access to the filter.
I’ve never had anything in the way of what I would call a “road trip” until rather recently in life.
My father wasn’t the type of guy to go camping with his kids.
He did borrow a truck with a camper from one of his air forces buddies when we lived on CFB Griesbach in Edmonton from 1980 to 1983, but this was so that he could take his new wife camping in the mountains.
In 2023 I had what you could call “road trips”.
One was to Ontario. And one was to Iceland.
The trip to Ontario was by Via Rail. This trip was booked so that it would happen right after I made my application for M.A.i.D.. I was intending to use the trip to have some quiet reflection after making my application for my death.
But of course, the Government of Canada capitulated to the imaginary friend brigade.
It was an interesting trip, but as usual depression and self doubt were my constant companions.
Initially I thought that the trip was going to be aborted in Winnipeg as there really wasn’t any space for me to be left alone on the train, but thankfully I discovered the “economy class” at the front of the train.
The “sleeper class” section of the train has access to the diner car and the bar car at the rear of the train. But with the exception of meal time, the diner car is off limits for sitting down in.
And the rear of the train is for socializing.
I don’t socialize.
I hate small talk.
And I hate polite talk.
So as can be imagined the trip started off as a nightmare.
But then I discovered the “economy class” diner.
And yes, I could grab a chair and sit at a table and write out to my heart’s content on my laptop.
My trip to Iceland came as a result of the settlement that I received for a previous childhood matter.
Ever since I received my medical reports from the PEI government in 2011 that indicated that my father had been in Iceland on the day that I had been knocked unconscious in a “bicycle accident” I had a desire to go to Iceland to see what was so special that he’d leave my brother and I alone in the PMQ while he flew off to an entirely different country with the Canadian Armed Forces.
The day of the “accident” was in July of 1978. My grandmother had returned back to Edmonton in the spring of 1978, and we moved to CFB Namao in Edmonton in August of 1978. My mother of course had been kicked out of the PMQ by my father in 1977.
I don’t recognize the names on the hospital records of the person who found me “laying” in the middle of the road and took me to the hospital. And my father’s name is the only name listed as Next of Kin, so it’s obvious that Richard wasn’t going to let his kids stand in the way of his flying to Iceland.
So, as I said, I was curious to see what was so special about Iceland.
I booked the trip so that I would be in Iceland for the summer solstice.
Iceland, or more specifically Reykjavik was interesting.
I didn’t get around too much of the island, I just stayed around Reykjavik, but I did violate one rule and I ended up out at the Black Sand Beach on the south east corner of the island.
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So, I never did discover a reason for my father to have buggered off to the island while leaving his kids unattended at home in military housing.
Maybe he thought that the other parents on base would just look after us in the same manner that he just expected everyone else to look after us.
And I can’t see having told his chain of command that he wouldn’t be able to go out on training exercises as he had a responsibility to look after his family.
Iceland is an interesting place. Nice and quiet. Everyone keeps to themselves, but they are very friendly.
If you have depression or anxiety Iceland is actually therapeutic as it gets you away from our toxic and highly dysfunctional culture.
The cycling culture is better than that of Vancouver’s.
Even though the Americans infected Iceland with car culture in the aftermath of WWII due to the presence of an American air force base on the island, bicycling is supported very strongly on the island. As is walking. Reykjavik is a very walkable city.
2023 Trip to Iceland
This counter that was just down the path from the hotel I stayed in shows that 5 bicycles and 16 pedestrians had passed this point by 00:58. Yes, the counter resets at 00:00. And yes, this is midnight on the summer solstice.
And the aforementioned US military presence on the island in the years after WWII is what fuelled the punk rock scene on the island, especially in Reykjavik. The punk rock scene exploded primarily as a force of resistance against the American influence on Icelandic culture.
There’s a wonderful little Punk “museum” in the heart of Reykjavik in an old converted public washroom. These public washrooms weren’t small, they’re pretty large. And hence there’s a museum in one of them. If you’re in Reykjavik you should give it a try.
Walking around in Reykjavik I realized that there weren’t many visible signs of drug use, mental health issues, or homelessness. That’s not because they don’t have these issues. It’s because unlike here in Canada where we are in a never ending race with the Americans to see who can cut their taxes to the absolute minimum while cutting as many social programs to the bone, Iceland heavily invests in social housing, looking after their mentally ill, and looking after their drug addicts.
Yes, their taxes are high when compared to Canada’s taxes, but they don’t have homeless people sleeping in doorways, homeless families living in cars, and homeless people shitting and pissing in the alleys.
And the truth about Canadian taxes is our tax rates, especially our lack of a wealth tax, is that our taxes are laughably so low that they’re criminal.
Canada’s tax rate is even less than America’s tax rate.
Christ, our tax rate is even lower than Ethiopia’s tax rate.
Yeah, it’s no wonder why we don’t have any investment in social programs and why our governments are trying to cut away as many social programs as possible. Our governments are trying to compete against Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia to be tax havens for the rich.
Anyways, would I go to Iceland again?
I probably would, given the chance. I’d plan for a couple of weeks stay and I’d try to get up to the northern part of the island to get as close to the Arctic circle as possible for the summer solstice.
I’ve been in Hogtown for a couple of days now. Just in town to see a concert, then I’ll be back off to Vancouver.
Haven’t done too much over the last few day except wander around downtown, ride some streetcars and the subway, and mainly veg out.
Yes, I used to live “here” and by “here” I mean on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in North York.
We arrived here in April of 1983 after fleeing my apprehension by Alberta social services.
We first lived at 94 Sunfield Road in the Lower Dividend Houses that were on lease to the CAF for use as military housing. In the fall of 1983 my family was moved to our new PMQ #223F Stanley Green Park that was located on the base itself.
I moved out of the PMQ and off the base in late 1987 just after I had turned 16. So in actual fact I only lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview for 4 years even though my father had been posted to CFB Downsview for 7 years.
The base is long since gone. It’s now a public park with a subway station in it.
Everything that I knew from 1983 until 1990 is pretty well gone.
I don’t know anyone out here, and to be honest I didn’t really know anyone back then either.
Places that I used to frequent as a teen on Queen Street West like Active Surplus and the other electronic surplus retailers have long since disappeared. Replaced with fine fashion and sneakers.
I often wondered over the years how things would have worked out in 1990 when I had about $40k in the bank from a 6 month contract job.
Somehow my father found out that I was in the process of trying to rent an apartment. “I’m getting my final posting back to Edmonton. I’d like you to move with us. We could try to be a family again”.
He wasn’t interested in trying fuck all. He figured out that I had some money in the bank and now it was time for me to pay him back for all of the years that he looked after my brother and I as kids.
I was a dumb 18 year old at the time. Couldn’t figure out why I was paying for all of the food and gas and stuff on the move from Downsview to Griesbach, but Richard wanted to keep the receipts “just in case”. If I was a betting man, I’d say that he submitted all of the receipts to DND for reimbursement. I know that he claimed me on his taxes even for the years that I wasn’t living with him.
I don’t know how things would have worked out had I stayed.
Far too many memories of people like Earl Stevens.
I got sexually assaulted so many times in Toronto.
I don’t know how, but the pervs always find the damaged kids and fuck them up even more. Couldn’t tell my father about Earl. Couldn’t tell my father about the man from Funland arcade. Couldn’t tell my father about the guy on the subway. Couldn’t tell my father about Al M. either.
Riding around on the subway earlier I remembered something that Scott had said about riding the subway for hours on end just to kill time. I did that myself. Get on the Subway at Wilson, find a seat, and just basically ride from one end to the other and back. And then get on the Bloor – Danforth line and ride from Kipling to Kennedy.
Back in the ’80s you could stay on the subway petty well all day and as long as you changed trains periodically, no one would be any the wiser. And as scrawny as I was back then I could easily pass for a couple years younger so it was something like $0.25 to kill the day.
I even got off the train at the Yonge Southbound platform to reminisce of all of the times as a kid that I wanted to jump in front of a train but just couldn’t work up the courage to do so. The layout of the Bloor-Yonge station gives the perfect running start.
Adam, who was a fellow cadet in Sea Cadets had asked me to never kill myself by jumping in front of a train because his father was a motorman and apparently jumping in front of a train fucks up the motorman a lot.
When you come from a family like mine you did anything you could to get the fuck out of the house and away from Richard.
As I walk around Toronto I’m not really filled with nostalgia for the place.
I remember my time downtown spent just wandering aimlessly trying to kill time. Except for places like Active Surplus, I didn’t really go shopping or browsing anywhere. With no money for food or for entertainment and no ability to make friends, Toronto wasn’t really a “home” as it was a distraction.
Maybe that’s why I’m not overtaken by feelings of nostalgia but instead feelings of sadness, despair, and boredom.
Anyways, going to see my concert and then I head back to Vancouver.
Don’t ask me what the concert is like. I keep this shit to myself.
I really don’t share this stuff with anyone as I don’t like to be judged or ridiculed for my taste in music.
Just on my way to the island for a quick little weekend trip.
I haven’t been to the island since back in the early aughts.
Just wanted to get out of the city for the weekend.
Decided to try out the new Hullo ferry service. Well, it’s not really new, it’s been operating since last year.
Normally getting to the island is a royal pain in the ass. Nothing wrong with BC Ferries, but those ferries are dedicated to car culture. And the ferry terminals are only really accessible via highways meant for cars. The whole experience from BC Ferries isn’t that great for someone who just wants to take a quick trip to the island.
One can take the bus to the ferry terminal, but still you can tell that the terminals and the ferries are geared towards drivers.
Hullo on the other hand operates from Downtown Vancouver to Downtown Nanaimo. And the fares aren’t that expensive either.
Just wanted to get out of the city for the weekend.
Spending way too much time at work. I’m currently filling two positions at work. My position as chief engineer, and the assistant chief engineer’s position as well. So much overtime. Probably way too much overtime.
So far my YTD is $112,000.00. And I have two months to go in this year.
I don’t mind working all this time. Work is all that I’ve done my entire life.
I started working way back in 1982. By 1987 I was on my own and working full-time. I think work is what has distracted me all these years. Kept me from realizing just how fucked up my childhood had been and just how much of a basket case I was.
Work has always been a double edged sword though.
I work at levels well above what my formal education and my mental health should allow me to work at. You’d think that this is great, but it causes a lot of conflict. See, as a 4th class power engineer I’m just supposed to rubber stamp what contractors want to do. I’m not supposed to have valid opinions about building automation. I’m sure as hell not supposed to be able to build BACnet networks and add them in and make them function.
But I do.
And it makes me realize just how badly I got fucked all those years ago.
For the most part the media in Canada is finished.
Very lax CRTC rules, very biased free trade agreements, and extremely toothless foreign ownerships rules means that our media for the most part is American owned and always has a pro-corporate, pro-capitalism, anti-worker bias, and anti-socialist policies at play.
It doesn’t matter if the newsroom or the head office has a Canadian street address. If the board of directors and the majority of shareholders are Americans, then the product that they produce is American propaganda.
We don’t have to worry about the Americans launching an invasion to take over Canada, the invasion has been going on since the Mulroney years in the ’80s, some might even say that the invasion started with Dief – the – Thief’s policy of overt American appeasement.
This morning when I logged into the cesspool formerly known as Twitter I caught this tweet from Lynda Steele.
This would be depressing, except Lynda is one of those in the news media that practically ensured the death of local media.
When Lynda was with 980 CKNW her pro-automobile industry / anti-alternative transportation biases were on full display. But I guess that she was just playing to her audience. The only place I’ve ever seen people listen to AM radio is in the car. But Lynda should have realized that the days of AM radio are coming to an end. Even FM radio isn’t far behind.
I stopped listening to radio back in the early ’00s when Rock 101 was blitzing the airwaves with that Spence Shriek commercial.
MP3 players made portable music that much easier to obtain and they totally negated my need for a radio. More importantly I never had to listen to that insistent Spence Shriek or annoying crap like it again.
People in general don’t like biases in their news, and people are fairly decent at detecting biases.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, the previous park board and city council agreed to install a bicycle lane in Stanley Park that would separate the bicycle riders from the pedestrians on the seawall thus allowing the pedestrians on the seawall to distance themselves by spreading across the walking path and the bicycle path and allowing the bicycle riders to continue using the park.
Now, I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth about what happened at CKNW, but to hear Lynda describe it lycra clad MAMILs were dragging the disabled out of their vehicles and euthanizing them at the main entrance to the park. The elderly were no longer able to drive to the park. Traffic in the park was now forced to drive at the posted speed limit. Car drivers were now forced to sit behind the horse drawn carriage tours and left to contemplate the meaningless existence of being a horse pulling tourists around and around in a loop.
In reality, there were only three groups of people upset at the bicycle lanes.
Car drivers using the park to avoid north bound traffic jams on the Stanley Park causeway. Car drivers using the park to avoid the downtown core by rat racing through the park to get to Beach Ave thus avoiding West Georgia, Burrard, and Howe.
And the most important group of all, the tour bus operators. There is a metric shit ton of money made in fares and tips from tourists that come to town on the cruise ships and want to go see “World Famous Stanley Park”. And no doubt there is some form of benefit to the tour bus operators when they deliver fresh cattle to the two “major” tourist attractions in the park.
The bicycle lanes made it impossible for tour busses to fit back in to the park. Because park drive was meant to meander through the park it has some tight bends. With the concrete barriers running through the park it would have been impossible for a full size tour bus to navigate.
Under an outrage that was practically stoked by the media Vancouver got a populist mayor elected with support from just over 18% of eligible voters.
The first thing Qatari Ken did when elected was to jump on an airplane to go watch a soccer game in Qatar. Hence why I call him Qatari Ken.
Ken’s plan was to rip out all of the bicycle lanes in the park to allow the “disabled and elderly” park users to get back into the park. Ken got as far as tearing out the lanes expect for the eastern Beach Avenue exit. The problem that Lynda and Qatari Ken didn’t account for was the public uproar that resulted from the removal of the bicycle lanes in the park.
It never was about the “elderly and disabled”. If it were then Qatari Ken and Lynda would have been pressing for a “community shuttle bus” that would stop at all of the hospitals, senior homes, assisted living homes, and other care facilities in order to give ALL disabled persons and elderly persons the ability to visit the park, especially those without families or those without the means to travel.
No, what it was all about was Qatari Ken riding a wave of populism in to the Mayor’s office to ensure that the interests of a select few business owners were looked after.
Both Lynda and Qatari Ken had been buoyed in their anti-bicycle / anti-alternate transportation biases because of the dynamics of the echo chamber. Lynda’s audience was only car drivers basically. So when Jim-Bob-Joe called in from Abbotsford to say that he’s never coming back to Stanley Park because the City of Vancouver has gone woke with bicycles, that’s what she heard.
The truth is there’s far more daily traffic from bicycle riders and roller bladers in the park than there is from actual park using car drivers.
But, I digress.
My beef with the media comes from the fact that not one single local news media outlet has dare look into historical child sexual abuse on bases that used to be located within city limits.
Does Lynda believe that no children were ever sexually abused on Canadian Forces Base Jericho in Vancouver during the days when both the 3-year-time-bar and the Summary Investigation flaw were in effect?
After report after report of the failure of the military justice system looking into sexual abuse of adults, isn’t Lynda and the rest of her cohorts curious in the slightest about the sexual abuse of children living on the same bases?
Isn’t Lynda, as a reporter, curious about the fact that children who lived on Canadian Forces Bases prior to 1998 don’t have the same rights that their civilian counterparts had?
When West End MP Hedy Fry said that she was not going to look into the matter of child sexual abuse on the Canadian Armed Forces bases in Canada because there were no bases in the West End even though I had lived in the West End since 1992, isn’t this “local news”? Isn’t it news worthy when a sitting MP says that a person can only get justice for military child sexual abuse if they live in a riding with a military base?
Is Canadian Forces Base Jericho not “local”?
Yes, fine, I get it. Lynda had no control over what stories she was allowed to cover and report on when she was at CKNW. CKNW survives on automobile advertising and its listenership is comprised of people stuck in cars. Therefore bicycles are a commie plot to steal your freedomobile away from you and force you to ride a bicycle.
Reporting on a story that would cause the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces a severe amount of negative publicity is something that corporate would have frowned upon as many of the owners are well connected and don’t want to be seen as pissing on the troops.
In the end, with the exception of just a few persons in the media, if the average “journalist” wants a paycheque they have to conduct the reporting that corporate dictates. But these “journalists” shouldn’t be surprised in the end when being a corporate puppet just means that the profession that they were a part of becomes a relic of the past.
And so far the “alternative media” is no better than the corporate media.
Beeshive 
