Diversity in the Neighbourhood

I have an ex-military neighbour who’s so right-wing while self-describing as a centrist (or as they like to call themselves - fiscal conservatives) who one time mentioned without a hint of irony that he was kind of fascinated with Augusto Pinochet.  That although he seemed to bully his critics and political opponents and generally appeared to not be a very nice guy, he did indeed spur strong economic growth in Chile.  My neighbour had been to Chile once or twice with the military and observed that “the people” really didn’t have that much bad to say about the guy.

Is it just me but I seem to recall back in the olden days there was a little more room for political curiosity and healthy skepticism?  The climate seemed more open for dogs to play with cats and colouring outside the lines was not quite so threatening a concept.  Regular Joe’s seemed to have more room to be inquisitive and prone to scratch the surface in order to gain some purchase on what makes things tick.

Itch relief and mechanical discovery in the case of the Pinochet reign would indicate militarily taking control and ousting a democratically elected government with the backing of the US and installing economics that included banning unions, killing dissenters, getting rid of certain tariff protections, imprisoning dissenters, privatizing a large number of government industry including social security and selling well below market value to (you guessed it) people within his own circle, torturing dissenters, and all the while amassing a personal fortune over the seventeen years of his iron-fisted dictatorship.  Did I mention he killed dissenters?

Pinochet used the influence of the “Chicago Boys”.  The Chicago Boys were a number of American educated Latin-American economists that had studied and believed in a libertarian free-market system of deregulation and privatization applied to heavily controlled economies.  

It’s worth noting that the Heritage Foundation credits them with transforming Chile into Latin America’s best performing economy and one of the worlds most business-friendly jurisdictions.    I just broke out in hives typing the Heritage Foundation.  I just did again.  It’s also worth mentioning that this training program was conceived back in the 1950’s by the US State Department as a kind of apprentice program between the University of Chicago and Chile’s Catholic University.  And again it’s worth noting that while the original project from the 50’s has ended the training program continues to this day.

I wonder when Milton Friedman, arguably considered one of the greatest western economists, was loading these boys up with all this good wholesome economic theory whether he clearly understood the symptoms usually associated to a “heavily controlled economy”.  I imagine it was a pretty sweet gig being one of the “smartest” dudes around and your behemoth government, so existentially terrorized by any other form of socio-economics outside of free-market capitalism, hands you a continent and a half of perfect petri-dishes in which to perform your experiments on like real people with like real lives.

Remember  - no irony, he meant it.  Should I admire that kind of conviction?

We All Gotta Problem Man

I recently found an extremely competent psychoanalyst.  Psychoanalysis apparently starts out like most things these days - with the ticky-box exercise.  There are numerous backgrounder forms that must be completed and supplied back that for some inexplicable (to me at least) reason appeases the governing college and prevents culpability or liability that would allow the insurance company to reject a claim. 

I’m not cynical enough to be saying that anyone other than my councillor is reading the content of these forms. I’m just saying that someone is saying that their completion is integral to help prevent some sort of bad outcome.

So my therapist asked me to fill out the forms and as I’m really trying not to make this a performative experience like I have every other time in the past when I’ve gone through the therapy process, I answered every question honestly.  Some really good shit too.  Things like under “What prompted you to seek services at this time”?, I gave the ol’ “the fact that the job left but the anxiety didn’t” and under “Please give a brief account of the history of your problem, from the beginning - I threw down “I have for forty years been anxious about work and how others perceived me and how some affectation continues” and then under the oldie but goody - “Is there any other information you think may help the therapist”?, I delivered - “I have spent my life working, toiling and playing in the matrix.  I’ve always dreamt about breaking free from it and live my true life.  Now that I have the chance to do this I still seem to keep my foot on the brake, afraid to pull the trigger that will free me up to do it”.

Oh and under - “Are you using any recreational drugs or alcohol for coping”?, I responded that “although coping is a big word, I do drink, primarily on the weekends and occasionally will consume a cannabis edible”.

Go ahead and guess which response seemed to illicit the strongest comment.  I’m guessing you guessed it.  How often are you consuming cannabis? was the closing question from my first session.  Her concern and I really found it to be quaint was that it can cause psychosis.  Holy fuck, do you not think that tug left the jetty a long time ago?  And this was after trying to describe to her how many times as a young explorer acid provided me an immediate line to “god” and the clarity in which it described back to me how we waste almost all of the beautiful blip in the space time continuum we’ve been granted.  

Vonnegut wrote: “maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists”.  Maybe I should have just written that down.

Regardless of this and myriad more subjectivity, I will endeavour to continue to veer away from the performative and offer up some faith that just talking about all this shit will aid solace as the blip dwindles.

I Gotta Problem Man Part Deux

Okay, maybe quantification hasn’t completely fixed it.  There probably shouldn’t be a throbbing mass of anxiety pooling in my solar plexus every night the backlight on the Kindle escape pod is extinguished if it were the appropriate retrofit right?  Since I’ve retired this quivering gob seems in a fit of exasperation and has gone downright revolutionary since my Kid got that cancer thing.

Anyway I thought prior to my diagnosis I should probably do the responsible thing and seek out some help.

I Gotta Problem Man

I suffer from a form of existential angst. 

Thankfully it’s easily quantified. 

I am simply stressed by the injustice that at some point a long time ago, be it by design or evolution, humanity fell into a perpetuating system of socioeconomics that behooved a teeny weeny minority toward wealth and allowed the chips to fall where they may for everyone else. 

That’s it. That’s the sum total of my malady. 

Thank god I wrote it down. I’m all better now. Bye. 

We’re Just Boomers in a Dangerous Time

Recently Suzanne and I were again mired in my favourite fun-loving conversation - the pandemic realpolitik.  You know the one - how critical thinking has somehow morphed into group think and how blessed we’ve been to be recently surrounded with such plentiful virology expertise, the pro’s and con’s of the science of isolation and curfew and blah and blah and blah.  You’d think we’d worn holes in these subjects long ago but mercifully something just then caused a small dent in the space-time continuum and the conversation pivoted to more of my recent favourites -  identity politics, free speech and gender.  

Oh goody!  

Suzanne argued that being cis-gendered individuals we far too often default to heteronormativity and as I’m a product of generational toxic masculinity and she of white feminism, it’s easy to ignore the totality of the gender spectrum.

I agreed that of course this vast spectrum exists and suggested that we’re all just a product of a number of undefined things - possibly a pinch of objective reality, a dash of biological evolution, a smidge of some obscure spiritual fatalism, possibly a dram of free will or merely just some crafted voodoo combination of a million things.  What it really boils down to is semantic as clearly nobody knows, why the hell does it matter and who the fuck is anyone to pre-suppose?  Just be kind to everyone and stop having all the answers.

It was at this point that Suzanne noted that our white oppression is intersectional and that no matter how much gas-lighting or how many micro-aggressions I do this was the truth and it was also true that I would be cancelled if my words got out.

I didn’t know what it was that I could possibly be cancelled from but it sounded kind of nice.  Just then another humane dent appeared and I remembered that the last quarter of the Rams/Cardinal’s game and the final round of the Sony Open were downstairs waiting on PVR.  Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time.  Maybe there is some beneficent control-centre floating atop a cloud somewhere.

Opinion or Mis-information?

Remember having an opinion?  I seem to remember back in the olden times when there existed the ability to share an opinion with someone other than those who’d unwittingly been trapped into a Faustian commitment that rendered listening to your babble inescapable.  Boy has that changed.  I recall those old timey opinions.  They were subtle or nuanced and sometimes unconventional enough to feel like a treat or singular enough to be goose-bump inducing.  

These new kinds of opinions are inclusive.  That’s another word that doesn’t appear to mean what it used to.  What is it with all these words that don’t mean what they used to?  Seems to me now it just means that opinion makes you in or else it makes you out.  These new kinds of opinions often times appear to me to be conjured and curated by whatever club you’ve attached your sorry ass to and anything that slightly contradicts the groupthink alchemizes into propaganda or mis-information.

I’m giving up having opinions.  It’s become too damn dangerous.  My political opinions used to come easy and with such clarity but now they just make me ponder bad things.  Bad things like:  how can I be anti-trucker and still think it’s insane that our government can subjugate rights by invoking the Emergency Measures Act?  How can I despise all discrimination and still think freedom of speech is integral?  How can I feel that humans are free to identify any way they want yet still feel sex on this planet is binary?  So many questions, so much danger.

Oh and then there’s the pandemic.

I remember a time when I was comfortable spouting my opinion that pharmaceutical companies were keenly directed toward markets that would maximize their profits.  You know the good old days before big sickness became ubiquitous in the first world and was really just a concern for the poor.  Like way back in 2015 when according to the UN 1.6 million people in Africa died from malaria, tuberculosis or HIV.  The drugs to prevent these deaths existed in abundance and were extremely affordable, problem was only around 2% were manufactured on the continent and that created a dearth of affordable medicine and the general population couldn’t afford to buy imported treatments.

Oh yeah and also from the UN in’15 - “many African political leaders and development experts believe that the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to offer technical support to African manufacturers. For example, in 2001, 39 international pharmaceutical companies dragged the South African government to court to challenge its plans to manufacture and import cheap, generic HIV/AIDS drugs”.  

The UN is a big husky brute of a bureaucracy with a befuddling mandate but sometimes they sure can put lots of good words together into sentences.  

But now apparently that we’re faced with this great big batch of white first-world sick all of a sudden if you’re to believe what your own eyes are reading or watching, some grand mal seizure of altruism has come over the pharma bro’s.  They’re now unbiased science with a big ol’twist of benevolence and with this motivation have discovered in the relative blink of an eye the vaccines to allow for us to scratch our way back to a semblance of normalcy.

Now I’m all for science.  It’s just that science is tied to the free market and the free market has historically been given a pretty wide berth for priorities possibly being open to manipulation and maybe just maybe a little too much emphasis gets directed towards profit and not so much to making all the people feel better.  Kinda like how the priority of vaccinating the planet quickly shifted when Omicron hit stride and boosters for the first world once again put worrying about those people on hold.

There’s are a number of terms for “priorities possibly open to manipulation”.  My favourite one is corruption and don’t start with the “but they’re businesses and they have to make money” stuff.  Free market capitalism wasn’t concocted with the idea for anyone to make this much money.

This here opinion might not make me guest of the day at the next neighbourhood barbecue.  In factually based information, when I judge this here opinion based on the stuff my own little beady eyes are reading or watching, I’m pretty sure it’s not an opinion at all.  It’s a lead ingot thrust into a fire metastasizing into mis-information gold and apparently I’ve shape-shifted into “one of those”.

These days I spend a lot of my time being anxious and wary of being the sucker momentarily cornered by some buffoon with similar righteous indignation.  It’s always so vehement and exacting and forthright and immediately indicates if I’m in the right place.  I’m usually not.  

But then, this is just my opinion.

I Was Something and I Think I Can Be It Again

I’ve been a lot of thing I’m not and I’m pretty sure I can be something I am again.

My Dad died a few years back.  He wasn’t well and what made him unwell was only going to get worse.  Ironically his coy ability to check out a mere day after yet another doctor prescribed tethering him to an oxygen tank came as a relief. It was obvious to all of us that he was way past having fun with the ageing process and magically he just conjured up the ability to turn the light off. 

Not having him around though is surreal.  It strikes me at the oddest times.  I can be doing anything and the obscurity of him not being here floods over me – that the one guy who was seemingly enamoured to listen to whatever bullshit I was dealing is no longer available, no longer sitting stoically in his chair, devoid of any demonstrative indication of how he felt save for the occasional subtle glint in an eye or tweak of his quiet posture that made it ridiculously obvious of how proud he was to have me as his son and somehow even more importantly, his friend.

I really miss him but it’s not that overtly emotional - oh my god he’s gone and I’m never going to see him again - emptiness.  It’s more the idea that I’ll never have the chance to just look at him and feel first person the sense of pride he exuded toward a guy he loved who continually struggled, sometimes succeeded and yet somehow always flushed him with pride.

 

Yeah I know that I tie his existence directly to how I feel about myself but oddly this appears to be how some of us weaker humans have learned to evolve.  All I know is that words, in my hands, are too weak a tool to convey the importance of this intrinsic human bond.

Dad loved what he “did for a living”.  I’m pretty sure he was in a perpetual state of professional happiness, contentment and fulfillment.

Dad was a builder.  He built houses primarily but other things too.  I can’t tell you how many times when we worked together that he would arrive on-site, brimming with piss and vinegar in possession of a solution to a situation that seemed inexplicable the day before.   In his typically reserved way he would explain that while he slept, the solution came to him.  Never did he intimate that he spent the night gripping it or tossing and turning in search of an answer - it just came to him while he slept.  Since these days I’ve always just assumed this is the basic difference between loving what you do and doing what you think you need to.

So the two things that lend me similar happiness and contentment are writing and building shit.  The writing comes with the fallibility of subjectivity, so one never really knows if the project is completed in the way it was initially designed.  That’s a good thing really, even if what's been penned is trash.  The objective is merely the process.

The building shit thing though is much more clearly defined.  It comes with conclusive design.  Even if it’s created on the fly, its rightness or wrongness is immediately apparent.  Clearly it’s impossible to trick physics and structure into being anything but deterministic.  The beauty is in the simplicity of the precision and it immediately kicks back an objective reality should one choose to leave it wrong.

So after being a whole bunch of other things I’m not now I’m a construction Project Manager.  I work on really big sites that have a million balls in the air, that possess manifold minutiae and an absurd level of bureaucratic hoop jumping.  I make “good” money doing this and make great money for the owners of the company.  This current and hopefully final project means I have an apartment in a small town two hours away from my home where I live during the week in order to do it.

I don’t hate my job. In fact often times I get a sense of gratification or pride from a job well done.  I just resent the fact that I have to fritter away so much time on it.  I just always assumed that once I achieved this level of maturity, after all the minute detail juggling and concurrence in the bureaucratic mating rituals, it would get easier.

 

This unfortunately is not the case.  As a young man, just at the very beginning of my career development and in conjunction with a pair of merry pranksters it was decided that we would spend our weekends undergoing prolonged periods of rigorous medicated training.  This type of training exemplifies to those with their eyes open, a different world.  At the conclusion of this experiment I should have been appropriately educated to changed course and explore a more obscure career path, something that better suited my recent learning, something with a more broadly conceived idea of social scheme. I apparently decided against this concept - no doubt for the same reasons that lead me to hide inside the medication in the first place.  Ultimately this has rendered me somewhat damaged when it comes to playing by the rules of our present paradigm and these rules tend to eat me up.  At 59 it’s not a good idea to allow there to be crap in your life that eats you up.  If one lets that stuff continue to get to you it won’t be long till there are mutating cells literally eating you up and therein lies the basis of my resentment.

My wife retired in May after thirty years with the federales.  I’m scheduled to leap gleefully from the hamster wheel in September of 2021.  The retirement countdown clicker, a virtual device usually enlisted by members of the federal public service, recently turned 600ish days.  Twenty months to fend off the development of mutating cells.  Twenty months till my daughter and son-in-law purchase their handy man special in the country in need of my tinkerage.  Twenty-two months till we board a plane probably to India to begin a third world exploration adventure and to capture it in words and pictures.

Twenty months till I am.