Category: Uncategorized

Recently I had what I thought was a mouth infection. Having worked for an optometrist, I equate it with conjunctivitis for the mouth. It wasn’t fun.

Now I went almost immediately for dental care, a bit of a wait as I was also about to receive my second covid shot. So I toughed it out for a couple of weeks to make sure the vaccine was in my system before I went to the dentist.

I reflected during that time on other medical emergencies and why I always hesitated to go for care.

Fear was only a small part of it.

Shame was the real reason.

How many of you have been shamed for being sick?

That is the reason I hate going to a doctor. Many of them have shamed me in the past.

This little gum affair – which turned out to be something entirely different, taught me this. Disease is NOT your fault. It is part of life. Everything on this planet eats everything else, and everything decays and dies. That is the unpleasant reality we live in. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. Eventually something will get you. Every living creature is subject to the same rule. It is NOT your fault.

We don’t deliberately go out into this world to get sick. It befalls us. We can live spotless lives and still get sick and yes, die. So for anyone (hello Mothers out there as well) to shame us for our physical misfortunes, they’d better watch out for karma.

My doctor and dentist do not shame me. I am fortunate. I have had specialists however shame me plenty, and treat me inferior for being a female, and now for being old.

It is wrong to shame anyone for misfortunes. Diseases befall us. Life and shit happen in equal measure. Just take a look at poor Job in the Bible. Yikes. He learned the same lesson. The terrible things he endured were NOT his fault, and his friends tried to shame him!

Be kind to yourself next time you are sick. It is just life happening. It is not your fault.

I read recently that a boss paid his former employee his fought for wages with a bucket of five cent coins that weighed 66 pounds.

I am fed up with this.

You blockhead owners and bosses of retail and restaurants are the most vile people on earth. Immature, self entitled brats. You can’t understand why no one wants to work for you. You point the finger at everyone else, you say they are lazy workers and blame the corrupt government, when it is YOU that is the problem dick head.

First of all IDIOTS, there is a pandemic going on, and the last place any one wants to work is in a place where they will be exposed to a lot of maskless, unvaccinated strangers. DUH.

Second of all, it is no secret that you treat your staff like shit. Pay them shit. Make them work long hours. No benefits. Steal their tips. They take abuse from you and customers. DUH.

You have such a disrespect for the people who make you a millionaire, you deserve to go out of business. And I could care less if we have one less restaurant if you are the owner of it.

I am fed up with your whining. Grow up.

I am of the opinion that many of our diseases are caused by too much or too little sunshine.

We are aware of the damage too much sunshine can inflict, especially since us intelligent human beings have found new and wonderous ways to make the sun unfriendly by polluting our air and making it so thin that the sun can fry us. Or our vanity insists on that all over alluring tan.

But have we considered how too little sunshine is also hurting our bodies?

When I was working, I got four weeks in the summer to find sunshine. But you can’t bottle it up and use for the other 11 months of the year when enslaved in an office.

I know how it can affect your moods, the infamous SAD syndrome. But I wonder how it might also make our bodies wither, you know, like a plant without light, all white and spongy.

Just a thought.

I am reading two great books about pan- and epidemics that prove we are idiots.

New Pandemics, Old Politics by Alex De Waal clearly shows us that history repeats and repeats and repeats and we never ever learn a damn thing. We follow an old script that never worked in the first place, and that is, we are in a war against pathogens, and ignore science. We don’t see the forest for the trees. We ignore or downplay evidence that is so in our faces, that it could be on our faces.

Modern Epidemics by Salvador Macip agrees, ‘We don’t learn from our errors.’

Neither do we learn from the facts.

Instead we whoosh around like the morons we are, motivated by emotions. Emotions are never logical and can be deadly.

I am fed up with the entire Covid pandemic, not because of the isolation or masks, but because of the astounding and abounding stupidity of the masses. They talk trash, throw trash and make an unpleasant situation a thousand times more unpleasant. I have lost patience with it all.

I could state all the facts and evidence that vaccines work until the cows come home, but people get high on emotions, even to their last denying, dying breath.

The solution to our problem is so simple and easy. Get vaccinated. Wear masks. Social distance. If you do this, our problem will be temporary. But as long as you scream and yell, make this a political issue and refuse the above, the longer this will go on, Covid will be a pandemic forever, and your life will be very short.

This is an old pet peeve, right up there with telephones, rockets and cars.

I live in a thin walled apartment. Noise is a common complaint of most multi dwelling tenants.

My neighbours are young. Fresh tenants. Their bed rubs against the wall letting me know they have a good time at least once a week. I am glad they are not tantric lovers, it is over in a few minutes.

But I guess the short love making had to be offset by something more lasting, so they installed a keyboard. In their bedroom. Next to the bed. Against my bedroom wall.

Who plays piano in their bedroom?

I had come home from getting the jab (covid vaccine) and wanted to lie down for a nap, when, my goodness, Nick Rhodes was in my bedroom pounding out a good tune. Fortunately, the person could play the piano. That is the only good thing.

So I solved that problem, easy enough, a nice little note. Turn off the sound, listen with your headphones please! Okay.

But these neighbors went on to install the nemesis of all my bad dreams, the horror of every tenant every where. Video games. Video games have bass, a lot of bass, buzzing, vibrating your ornaments off your shelves bass. Repetitive, throbbing mind numbing, hours and hours and hours of bass.

In their bedroom.

WHY?

Okay, I don’t want to know. Just please. Everyone out there who wants to make noise. Delights in noise. Can’t live without noise. Turn the sound off and wear F’in headphones!

During the war, my Mother lived near Camp Barriefield (now McNaughton Barracks) and that is where she met a handsome Sergeant Major, my Dad.

My grandfather gave Mom a cocker spaniel to keep her company as she was often alone on the farm. That dog was under the bed at the least sign of trouble, except when the sound of an old two seater motorcycle, the kind with a side carriage came rumbling up the road. That was my Dad coming to visit. He loved my Dad. Not because my Dad was so nice. It was the motorcycle.

After Dad’s visit, as soon as he fired up the old cycle and was on his way, that devil may care cocker spaniel could squirm free of any constraint and was in hot pursuit, tongue hanging out, ears flying, all the way back to Barriefield.

And with tongue hanging out, ears flying, that clever dog would get a joyous ride in the side cab all the way back home.

My Mom’s birthday was last week. I have some good memories.

During the depression, my Mother and her Dad lived on a farm near Kingston, that the 401 highway now ungraciously divides in half.

Fortunately, my Mother had interesting stories to tell of such a miserable time. She managed to make the humourless a bit entertaining.

Like when she told me they ate turnips for an entire year. I couldn’t eat turnips until I was a junior senior.

Perhaps the story I like best is Psalm 121.

Many hobos would come to their farm and my Mother and Grandfather would feed them and help them out for a short spell. She never thought much of it. One of them gifted her a metal tin with roses on it, which I still have.

When the person was about to leave, my Mom would recite Psalm 121 to them.

I just think that is so neat.

The highway in front of my apartment building has become a drag strip for motorcycles. Their high pitched whines like nails on chalkboard.

Every weekend there are over a hundred stunt driving arrests.

I’ve seen vehicles drive over the lawn instead of going a few feet more to the entrance of the shopping mall.

Cars speed up when they see pedestrians crossing the road, or refuse to apply brakes to at least slow their trajectory.

Bicyclists ignore traffic lights, I’ve almost been hit twice now, and they swear at me and give me the finger.

In Providence they have a colossal problem with ATV drivers who go through red lights and gang up on car drivers and beat them up.

The Greek Church next door blatantly disregarded the law (both lockdown and noise regulations) and had a huge outdoor party in August and kept the entire neighbourhood up, blasting music and shouting until 2 a.m. They still adamantly have their festival and lure hundreds to eat and drink and dance and shout past midnight for 14 days running (though they think they are clever and for covid reasons have reduced it to two-3 day weekends in a row instead, for now.) My opinion is this: If you are stupid enough to be in a crowd of hundreds of people and whoop it up for hours during a pandemic, well…)

In our stores we have anti maskers who scream in your face and can’t mind their own business, and anti-vaxxers who storm buildings (even the wrong ones) in protest.

Our pandemic world looks a lot like Mad Max’s world, post apocalypse.

I am hoping it is just backlash to being confined so long, albeit a very immature and selfish backlash. Go out and expend your energies cleaning up the trash instead of being trash. Instead of wild parties that destroy everything in their wake, including lives, use that energy to help someone fix up their house, go shopping for them, do something useful. Like, I need even say this?

I like the British Royal family.

Oh, yes, I know, they are humans and have their fair share of scandals. Not pretty.

I just like the look of them. I like beautiful things. They have so much class. The way they walk, talk, dress. The veneer may be thin, but I don’t care. I like all that pomp and circumstance. It is a fairy tale.

I don’t expect anything from them. They are celebrities. But unlike some actors, billionaires and certainly most musicians, they have class.

It is good they don’t currently have much power or say in the political realm or we would have dictators. It seems to be a common human flaw. A little bit of power and zoom! We are going to oppress the masses. Off with their heads!

Disenfranchised royals however, that whine and complain about how difficult life is, is another matter entirely. It is like a bad smell to go on Oprah and whine when you live a privileged life for no reason other than it was gifted you by default of your birth and genetics. Where is the dignity and class in that? And we all have problems. Get over it. Grow up. Live with your choices. No one gives a shit about my choices. Friends would slap me in the head, and rightly so, or desert me completely, if I became a snivelling rat over my problems. I know because I have done it (cringe, cringe). Now I have one person pity parties. I don’t invite the whole world to feel sorry for me.

I do not envy royals at all. It would be like living under a microscope. Must be very hard work and tiring to maintain that outward perfection. But for me, I get to enjoy the end product. They look so good!

The pandemic has soured me to all forms of organized religion.

They are all cults.

Now, mind you, many churches have done commendable things. They have helped people in need. I have seen a church I once belonged to buy a car for a family, help with rent payments, buy food, get people jobs. These are the things I expect a loving community to do. I would expect people of God to do. Leaders to do. These are not above and beyond board duties, this comes with being a Christian. It is not exemplary. In fact, if you are doing good in order to indoctrinate someone to your church, you are in a cult. If you do good irrespective of religion, you are a good human being.

Out of the pandemic surfaced dictators. Cult leaders that do not care for their flock. Tyrants who use the name of God for their own ego and agenda, who defied science and the law and brought people together and exposed them to covid. And people died. DIED. Needlessly.

How many times have I read about congregations with smug, outrageous ministers who thumbed their almighty nose at common sense, science and the law, insisted on mass gatherings without social distancing and masks, oh, because God will protect them, we demand our freedom! Then two weeks later, they all moan and cry and set up go fund me pages because entire families contracted and died from covid they got at these rallies. Self serving trump like rallies. SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.

And evangelicals who worship a man, a politician, who has probably violated every good thing mentioned in the Bible. Who fly around in million dollar airplanes, party on yachts, have ‘pool boys’. Bleed people for money to support their debauchery. Bible thumpers who never cracked open a Bible in their life. Yes, I am plenty mad about it. Sick too.

PEEVED.

I will never go back to Church. Never.