The Terror Comes to Quebec

Tags

Canada, Islam, justin trudeau, kevin o'leary, Quebec, quebec city, racism, shooting, terrorism

 

The response of Canada in general and Quebec in particular to the murder of five men and the wounding of many more in a Quebec City mosque has been deeply gratifying, and it defines the difference between this country and the United States. The violence of a self-professed white supremecitst neo-Nazi, along with his guns, is clearly very alien here – and so it should be – shocking the entire nation merely by its appearance, which is a quotidian affair down south. For the first time, Prime Minister Trudeau Le Petit proved he is not the invertebrate he has seemed to be over the past year, delivering a number of impassioned speeches – remarkably free of his usual neurotic gasps and ahs – that hit precisely the right note of unification within diversity, of a common identity despite trivial differences, of neighbourliness, mutual assistance in troubled times, and a common understanding that overrides all the hateful actions of a miniscule minority. This may well be Trudeau’s Winston-Churchill-Moment, his Finest Hour, his Blitz. Despite snide comments from the useless Opposition Party leaders, he has continued to walk the fine line between Canada’s vital trade with the US and the need to uphold and protect our values as an open and welcoming nation for refugees and immigrants, no matter where they come from or what faith they profess. Given the recent and interminable provocations from the White House, this is no easy thing for someone of such avowedly liberal inclinations. As leader of the not-always-so-liberal Liberal Party, it is a balancing-act requiring enormously deft skill. If Trudeau emerges unbloodied from his soon-to-be meeting with the new American President, and if our trading relationship is still intact — $ 2 billion crosses that border daily – then his stature will be increased manifold, the once-concealed titanium backbone visible for all to see. After the gamboling and shilly-shallying of this past year, it is remarkable to find that Le Petit has a much deeper and stronger core in him, and can at times seem to understand truly what he talks about – or maybe it is just a matter of truly caring about that of which he talks?

 

It is fortunate that the Quebec City shooter proved to be a lone wolf. Early reports had stated that there were two assailants, one with a Muslim name – a claim that Fox News was still posting three days later, 72 hours after it had been disavowed by the police here. More kudos to Trudeau for a letter from his office accusing Fox of “playing identity politics” and demanding that the post come down — which it duly did, complete with a rare apology. Trudeau termed the mosque murders “a terrorist attack”, which was true enough, but it may have made the more feeble-minded media fixate upon the usual terrorist act, which to them is so-called Islamist agents mowing down us infidels wherever we gather. It is more complicated than this, of course, but terrorism is also US drone attacks that “inadvertently” slaughter hundreds of innocent civilians. It is the invasion of sovereign states too, and the CIA financing or fomenting of rebellions against democratically-elected governments all over the globe. Since September 11^th 2001, there have been less than 50 citizens killed in the US by identifiable terrorists working on behalf of an “Islamist” organization – and those few killers were all US-born American citizens, who only imagined they were Muslims. Worldwide, the death-toll of innocents as a direct result of US covert operations is unknown – the Pentagon openly states that “we don’t do body-counts” – but it is believed to number, over the past decade, in the high six figures. So the balance of terror is well in Washington’s favour, or to its shame – and this is what principally motivates those we view, rightly or wrongly, as the Enemy. What happened in Quebec City does not therefore easily compute in the minds of all too many journalists, who are now focussing like hungry vultures on all the grief and heartbreak, as well as, with immense satisfaction, on all the national peace and love, all the weeping vigils, the flowers and gift-baskets. The term “lone wolf” equals “homicidal psychopath” – nearly impossible to predict or prevent – which means his motives are not worth seeking out, because insanity is its own impermeable motivation.

 

I cannot help thinking, however, how different the reactions of Canadians would be had the victims in Quebec been us, the white majority, and the murderers self-alleged Muslims. People forget that western Islamic communities are also much in need of support, comfort and sheer neighbourliness after such events as the Paris attacks or the Brussels bombings, when they feel most unsafe and fearful. What they most fear and feel unsafe about is what just happened in a Quebec mosque. It is good that we are finally hearing this from the lips of Canadian Muslims, many of whom now tell of more minor hate-crimes they’ve experienced, or the random hostility of strangers that makes wives, daughters and mothers afraid to walk the streets in daylight. But we must remember all of this when next we hear of Islamist terror attacks.

 

 

The Islam of 99.999 percent of Muslims is a religion of peace, compassion and fraternity — period. And Muslims are, after all is said and done, only 0.3 of Canada’s population. If we took in a million more refugees – which we could do and should do – they would only amount to 0.6 of the population. Nothing.

 

 

Just as the Torah, Tanakh and the Gospels contain passages of an horrendously bloodthirty or hateful nature, so, unfortunately, does the Holy Koran. But these texts were all written by and for a nomadic and clannishly warlike peoples many hundreds of years ago – yet all orthodox believers contend that they are the words of God, and thus cannot be edited or revised. The Kabbalists, just like the Sufis and Christian mystics, have found an interpretive way around this dilemma, and it is to be hoped that the mainstream of all three monotheisms will eventually follow suit. The Koran (which means “recited verses”) is, as its name suggests, meant to be chanted aloud, not read in silence. The classical Arabic in which it was written makes a good third of the text impossible to understand with any certainty, because, at its earliest stage, the written language more closely resembles a mnemonic device to aid those chanting the suras from memory – as the faithful are urged to do, because the words are, if often opaque in meaning, surpassingly beautiful to hear. This linguistic difficulty also means that all translations are necessarily interpretations, just as all interpretations are not necessarily accurate transmissions of meaning. Any devout Muslim scanning a terrorist website – many of which are funded by the fabulously wealthy and heretical Saudi Arabian Wahhabite sect – will instantly recognize quotations taken out of context, or drawn from writings other than the Koran and posted without any ascription. But the untutored youthful rebel looking for a cause will not know this. We must now remember that the radicalized Muslim kid is no different than Alexandre Bissonette, the 27-year-old Quebec neo-Nazi shooter – except you don’t really have to sift through or take out of context anything in the rantings of Adolf Hitler to find something suitably repulsive, hateful and violent for a causus belli.

 

The Province of Quebec, where I live, seems to be embarrassed or shamed by this horrible act, and she protesteth too much methinks. Such a strong showing of many thousandsturning out in support of the Muslim community, and many politicians, both provincial and federal – including the Prime Minister – joining them, belies the fact that Quebec has a darker and uglier side. You know this is true when the Premier denies it is true – not to mention the revelation that French radio shock-jocks in the province often broadcast racist rants. I don’t listen to French radio, but obviously someone does – and not a few someones, either, if advertising incomes are to be profitable enough to warrant keeping the shouters on air. Mordechai Richler recalled seeing hotel signs in the fifties reading No Jews or Dogs, and we still often hear of defiled mosques, synagogues, religious community centres, and of desecrated Jewish cemetaries. There are no Muslim cenetaries here – yet. The simple truth is that hate-crime stats in Quebec are far higher than those for the rest of this country. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the Jew exists only in the mind of the anti-semite – and it follows that the Muslim only exists in the mind of the Islamophobe. This glimpse of real Quebec Muslims that we are now getting, curtesy of their immense tragedy, ought to dispel the fantasy-images based on fear and ignorance. As Premier Cuillard wishfully stated, perhaps this is a turning-point in Quebec history. But, if it is merely hinged upon the nature of another terrorist attack, perhaps it is not.

 

French Canadiens imagine they have a long history of grievances against the English – whom they also imagine dominate federal government and are imposing multiculturalism on them – when in fact the British, after their 1759 consquest, could hardly have treated them more equitably. They kept their language, their legal system and the Catholic faith, when the norms of conquest dictated that English language and law should be imposed. No one in Britain at the time was allowed to practice Catholicism, so the Quebecois were in effect treated more liberally than British citizens. But a conquered people are never allowed to be content – it’s human nature. They complain endlessly, just as the Israelites in the Wilderness complained to Moses about everything. A largely imaginary grudge has now festered here for something short of 300 years, and it views anything deemed alien as an imposition by the despised English, who are believed to run everything with malign intentions – even though no government can be elected without the vast Quebecois vote. Despite the fact that Canada declares itself to be a multicultural country in the Charter of Rights, Quebec, which is even recognized by Ottawa as a “nation”, officially announces that it is proudly not multicultural. Everyone just shrugs: c’est les Francais. Many hardliners here, always seeking referenda to separate from Canada and be a litral sovereign nation, view such things as Indigeneous reservations and rights, as well as the current high immigration stats to be malignant impositions by the English-speaking majority, and designed to undermine or erode Quebecois values. Hardly anyone in the whole country denies their right to speak French, more or less, or pursue a unique and somewhat French-like culture, more or less. I for one find it an oasis of charm and politesse in the North American desert. But the Internet and social media are slowly eroding this from within, and young Quebecois are becoming increasingly bilingual, cognizant of their place in a still largely Anglo continent. This is bound to suffer blowback – and so it is. Just as the advent of Donald Trump is really all about a yearning for simpler, greater, whiter times, so the rise of Quebecois racism is really all about Francophile xenophobia and the pipe-dream of sovereignty – which is rapidly fading in the harsh light of a new day. But much of Quebec remains a backwater of startlingly primitive and ignorant communities, sheltered from North American realities by a media of stunningly narrow and parochial concerns. It is not unlike conditions in rural areas of the southern US states, fed on Fox Opinions and the intemperate tirades of Trump, along with the mad barrage of right-wing radio and fundamentalist Christian televangelists. Education is of course the only answer to this woeful condition, and education in Quebec – as it is in much of the US – has deteriorated into a muddle of confusion and nonsense, depriving first to sixth-graders of the bilingualism they most need and which could be most easily taught as conversation to kids of that age. Not a few here believe that this failure in the school system is designed to prevent the Quebecois from exploring the Big World, and thus retaining their Anglophobia, which will enslave them to atavistic sovereignist values and concerns. It will not and cannot work, for human beings are inevitably drawn to a critical mass – and what happened in that mosque does seem to be forming a new mass-opinion of some considerable size.

 

It is also trashing the vain hopes of Canada’s Francophobic wannabe Trump, Kevin O’Leary – who actually seems to live mostly in America. True to the idiotically insensitive form of his role-model, Kev – wealthy entrepreneur of dubious ethics, and abusive reality-TV co-host – posted online a video of himself laughing maniacally as he fired off a machine-gun in a Florida shooting range. You might say this was somewhat lacking in empathy after the Quebec slaughter – and many did say it. So many indeed that one of his lackies apologetically took down the offending video. But Kev had to lie, saying he took it down “out of respect” for the slain. Well, it was what Trump would have done, wasn’t it? What Trump wouldn’t have done, however, is run for the leadership of a party three years away from any general election. Perhaps Kev miscalculated this? In the unlikely event that he wins, he will have to spend over two years as Opposition Leader in the terminally boring House of Parliament – and show up nearly every day for even more terminally boring and stultifyingly trivial or petty debates. The media will be watching. He can’t return to his Big American Life, can he? Worse still, he can’t be sure of winning the 2019 eklection either – especially if sunny-boy Le Petit retains his backbone. Worse than that is the gambit of modelling himself after Trump, and thus being tied to the Trump fortunes – which even the most flamboyant bookmakers are currently not giving good odds on. The Puritanical dinosaur, Mike Pence, is by far the favourite in this race to avoid a  common doom. No, Kev has not thought this through at all. At what point will he say it’s all rigged? In fact it is rigged in my opinion – rigged to end in preposterous confusion whatever happens. Like the US system, ours is broken beyond repair. It’s an 18^th-century relic that belongs in a museum of governance. But you cannot replace it by running as a candidate who will dismantle government, can you? The only question worth asking is: can it be done peacefully, and then what will replace it? I suggest a look at the Vedic texts on this subject, and a study of the Torah’s social laws. Wise men always knew how best to organize and govern any society. It has been unwise men who’ve fouled the nest.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

 

Deschooling Society

Tags

Canada, education, England, Quebec

Regarding the article by Catherine Solyom in The Montreal Gazette for August 16th, I was surprised to find no mention in Ms. Solyom’s intriguing article, Class Dismissed, of Ivan Ilyich’s seminal work on this very subject, Deschooling Society, in which he tackles all of the issues raised here, though with more archaic sagacity and insight. I attended an all-boys’ school in England afflicted by all the ills of which Ilyich complained: the division of time and the nature of study by bells; the emphasis on conformity in dress; the enforced deference to black-gowned teachers; the obedience to often arbitrary rules; the vital importance attached to marks, grades, and who was ‘top of the class’, etc. I read Ilyich’s book while at that school, agreeing with every word of it. However, after winning a scholarship to Oxford University, I found myself in an environment of academic and social freedom much like the one advocated in Deschooling Society; and I was extremely ill-equipped to deal with it. Suddenly, my time was my own, governed merely by two one-on-one tutorials a week, for each of which I was expected to produce a paper of some 20 to 30 pages in length. There was also a one hour group seminar for the eight or nine men reading the same subject – English Literature and Language – as I was in my college. There were lectures open to all university students, yet these were not obligatory. The management of my time was a matter solely of my own concern. My college in those days was all-male; its gates were closed at midnight, although there were ways of climbing in, providing one was not caught by ‘Bullers’ – bowler-hatted university police or enforcers, who roamed the streets after midnight in search of errant scholars. For there were a few women’s colleges; and when one’s life has been spent in an all-boys’ environment, the presence of young ladies was a confusing novelty, which interfered greatly with management of time.

Fifty years later, reading of the vagaries associated with ‘unschooling’, in Ms. Solyom’s piece, I find myself both grateful for and critical of my own pre-university schooling. Without it, I should never have had the advantages of studying Greek, Latin, and numerous other subjects holding no attraction for a child of eleven. I would never have had the opportunity to act in and direct plays; nor to learn carpentry and pottery. Yet, on the other hand, the school, with its encouragement of robotic conformity and its rigidity of structure, in no way prepared me for the boundless freedoms of Oxford. I felt there ought to have been at least a year’s transition period preparing us for a life that was more like Life. But Ilyich’s point had in fact been that such a school system did prepare its students for Life. Most of my friends did not go on to Oxford and a life of leisure in the Arts; they went into the offices and dark satanic mills of bureaucracy or commerce, where their robot-training was immediately continued in various ad hoc forms.

When my own children came of school age, I seriously considered home-schooling, partly because I had the time and qualifications for conducting it, and partly because I considered 80% of time spent at school wasted upon pointless activities and the seemingly impossible task of maintaining discipline without the means to do so. In my school, discipline was strict; pupils were quiet and well-mannered – because corporal punishment existed. There was always the threat of caning, whose effect lay far more in the threat, the possibility, than it did in the actual practice. Admittedly, there were a couple of sadists, who meted out their own forms of physical punishment – a couple, and incidents were rare. The threat created the discipline.

From my experience of my own children’s schools, discipline was an impossible dream, and it took merely one loud-mouthed kid – who had worked out that teacher had no power – to turn any classroom into mayhem. I disapproved of almost everything about the system, from the abolition of competition – everyone must get a prize – to the absurdity of lessons. Reading, writing, and arithmetic appeared to have been abandoned in favour of non-subjects, like ‘social studies’, and projects involving glue, macaroni, wooden skewers, and so forth. Parents complained if their child received poor grades; yet teachers never complained that parents ought to spend more time talking and reading to their kids, rather than letting them watch TV or play video games.

Home-schooling plays a major role in any kind of schooling, and always has done. But it involves time and discipline – and I don’t mean beating; I mean punishments and rewards that actually mean something to a child, and are not idle threats.

When I read in Ms. Solyom’s piece of the notion that children should be left to discover for themselves where their interests lie, I shuddered, recalling how my own childish interests had ranged from piracy, through train-driving, to geology and astronomy. Without forced exposure to history, literature, Latin, and so forth, I would never have arrived at the areas in which my interests truly do lie.

The subtext of this entire article seemed to me to be a severe dissatisfaction regarding what is taught in our schools, and how it is taught. Over the past few decades, teachers seem to have rearranged curricula to suit their own lazy concerns. As my own children ascended the educational ladder, the matter they were studying increasingly appalled me. Were I not so opposed to private education as the most obnoxious form of classism, one which no society ought to sanction, I would have packed my kids off there, along with half my income. For I once gave a talk to students at Upper Canada College – probably the best of Canada’s private schools – and was startled by the good behaviour, attentiveness, and intelligent questions emanating from the boys assembled in my classroom there. Leaving the pleasant buildings and grounds of the school, however, I was overcome by a sadness: why should such an educational environment only be available to the rich? The author John Le Carre recently said the same thing to the CBC’s Eleanor Wachtell; that, as long as Britain’s public schools (the English term for ‘private schools’) exist, the class system will survive to the detriment of all. A far superior education, conducted among one’s peers, inevitably leads to a two-tiered society, where the princes and peasants know their places, yet the middle-class are squeezed, by their own ambitions to climb the social rungs, out of existence. These, it may be recalled, were the very conditions that sparked the French Revolution.

To stem this capricious tide of anti-schooling, I would suggest a complete overhauling of curricula, more money spent on – and more excellence required of – teachers; the abolition of private schools, religious or otherwise; far smaller classrooms (20 children to one teacher at the very most); and a return to real teaching, not the reliance on video and computer aids, which only incite hypnotic disinterest in pupils. Subjects taught – after reading, writing, and math have been mastered – ought to include both official languages, though in an oral form, so that students can talk them first, then perhaps read them; an overview of world religions, to encourage multicultural mutual respect and understanding; a firm grasp of world history, rather than the Euro-centric version current; a course on Canadian political institutions and citizens’ rights; and then, after the age of sixteen or so, specialisation by choice in the sciences or humanities. All of this would be accompanied by real work, not risible projects, and students falling behind would be assigned special help in consultation with their parents, who must be made aware of their own vital role in their child’s progress. In special cases, where a parent is clearly incapable of providing more guidance, special provisions ought to be provided, even involving tuition during the long holidays that adequately-reimbursed teachers could hardly expect to continue enjoying. Yes, it will involve public money; but what better cause than the education of future generations can there possibly be?

The opting out of a system gone awry is, it would seem, a savage criticism of that system which is being truculently ignored by the system itself, one that has always chosen to place the blame for its own failures on other factors or persons. Ms. Solyom has written a fascinating and insightful article, one that ought to worry everyone who cares about education, both in Quebec and in Canada as a whole.

Sincerely,

Paul William Roberts

Canada Day

Tags

Canada, England, France, Immigration, politics, Quebec, taxation, welfare

What do we have to celebrate? A lot, I would say. I still believe that this is the best place to live on earth, in spite of those who would make it otherwise. What can we, as Canadians, do to protect what we have? Well, there are radical ideas, like the overthrow of a governmental system that is antiquated and dysfunctional; or there are less disruptive notions, like learning from the mistakes of other nations. Take Britain, where three trillion pounds annually of taxpayers’ money is spent on welfare projects, much of which is squandered on people perfectly able to work, yet finding the prospect irksome, this idleness encouraged by an administration more concerned with its own beaurocracy and red-tape than it is with executing the task at hand. For example, a woman with three children, from three different fathers, is given free housing, plus assistance for herself and her three children, until they are eighteen. No part of the system is given the task of finding a way in which she can work while her children are cared for. In other words, the system is designed to offer free money to those who fulfill certain, all too rudimentary, requirements. And these requirements are determined by a form, filled out with help from a ‘social services officer’, and not by any investigation of circumstances. The result is a country overwhelmed by debt and social chaos, one in which the rich get richer on the backs of the middle-class taxpayer. Another example: Paris is now a city of 60 million inhabitants, twice the population of Canada, the second-largest country in the world. This is a consequence of immigration policies resulting from the misguided, and ever burgeoning, Euro Zone, which differ slightly from the punishments of colonialism and empire (in which the conquered were, naturally, entitled to citizenship in the conquerors’ nations). An economic union between advanced industrialized countries, like Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian nations, made sense. To devise a common currency, among such countries, even made sense. But to include such places as Romania, Spain, and Greece – not to mention others on the list – was sheer idiocy. The consequences of this folly are now all too evident, and may well result in the dissolution of the whole union. The resultant waves of emigration to welfare havens, like France and the U.K., are causing severe social unrest. The erudite, and much misunderstood, British politician, Enoch Powell, predicted this back in the sixties, when immigrants from Pakistan, India, and the West Indies, began swelling the population of London, and other cities, like Birmingham. Powell stated that this would lead to racial warfare, and he was right. Unfortunately, Powell gained support from unsavory neo-fascist elements, like the National Front, and the Skinheads. Diana Macleoud, daughter of the great English politician, Ian Macleoud, once told me that her father, who was a great friend of Enoch Powell, told him that he was stirring up neo-fascist sentiments and racism with his views, and was regarded in some quarters as a new Sir Oswald Moseley (whose pro-Nazi Blackshirts had once terrorised the streets of London during the years leading up to World War II). Powell, Macleaoud had told his daughter, was appalled at this news, and had no intention of provoking such sentiments. He kept his views to himself thereafter. But his predictions were right. In a country where unemployment is high, there will always be resistance to an influx of immigrants seeking the same elusive jobs.

In Canada, we are faced with a similar, yet also utterly different, situation. While it behooves us to take in refugees from such nightmares as Syria, Somalia, and so on, we need to ensure that these refugees will not clog the major cities with self-enclosed communities increasingly hostile to the rest of the population. The current anti-Muslim feelings, promoted by some media, all but guarantee this. “I and all schoolchildren learn,” wrote W.H. Auden, “that those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

Although our country is vast, and we desperately need more people to help pay the taxes, this influx of immigrants and refugees cannot be allowed to settle in the major cities. Where then should they go? The Harper Government’s obsession with eradicating the national deficit – a sum so paltry that most U.S. congressmen could pay it off, with a little help from their friends – ignores the more important concerns of infrastructure, especially within cities. To accommodate hordes of immigrants and refugees, besides providing work for those welfare vampires sucking our tax blood, there need to be enormous projects, not unlike the Pharaonic Pyramids, to occupy thousands profitably, and for many years. The opening-up of the North, thanks to Climate Change, also provides opportunity for an abundance of similar massive projects. It is, I suggest, the job of a government, not to balance books, but to dream big. To gaze into a distant future, rather than at the next election, or bottom-line.

I left Toronto four years ago, for personal reasons, yet also because the city I knew for thirty years was becoming just another overcrowded metropolis. It seemed to me that someone had decided the function of cities was to grow, and grow, and grow. Is there an example on earth of a city that has benefitted from excessive growth? Ottawa still strikes me as a reasonable place, an environment in which it is still pleasant to live. Montreal, however, from which I am 90 minutes away, is culturally vibrant, to be sure, yet also a chaotic hell for the driver, and, in addition, a place redolent of the kind of racism pervading some British cities. The unlamented ex-premier of Quebec even cited immigration as the cause of the terrorism afflicting Britain. She was not entirely wrong, though extravagantly unaware that her own anti-Islamic non-policies were the real causes behind such home-grown terrorism.

Quebec claims to be a non-multicultural society, within a multicultural Canada, yet such notions are as antiquated as the guillotine. The future of this country, which includes Quebec, and always will, relies upon some intelligent thinking by whomsoever is in control of it. Allow in as many immigrants as possible, by all means, but distribute these people across this enormous land, rather than allowing them to create mini-nations within every province – ones that will, someday, harbour the same separatist idiocies that continue to cripple Quebec’s future. You leave your country for ours, you leave your nationality behind. You swear allegiance to our Queen and Country, and that oath is binding. Anyone breaking it, I suggest, has lost their right to live here.

In the same way, anyone living on welfare, while being capable of working, is a tax-vampire. As someone who now lives on a monthly disability pension – ‘lives’ being a scarcely appropriate term – I can honestly say that I would take any employment of which I was capable, if offered, in order to pay my way. Why is there no organization to find work for those on welfare? We do not wish to find ourselves in the disastrous state which Britain now faces, do we? Unpopular as it may be – among those who don’t vote anyway – a plan of work-fare makes eminent sense, and ensures a future not over-burdened by idlers, encouraged in their idleness by a dysfunctional system. Philanthropy when it was a private endeavour, focussed on the needy, not the greedy. With our enforced system of philanthropy, via taxation, it is surely the right, and duty, of citizens to decide who deserves assistance, and who does not – just as it ought to be our right, by democratic vote, to decide if our taxes are well-spent on $40 billion-worth of warplanes for a military we cannot use effectively, nor can afford. I believe it is the right and duty of every Canadian citizen to report on suspected abusers of welfare, as it is to decide how and where their tax dollars are best invested. We cannot, and ought not try to compete with the U.S.A., which can no longer even uphold the role of Global Cop, to which it once believed itself elected, let alone cope with its domestic social and economic chaos.

I still remember when the Maple Leaf button assured one safe passage through the world’s disaster zones. Canada then meant equitable dealing, unbiased politics, and decent, humanitarian concerns. These qualities are worth all the biased, tough-guy posturing we hear today; and they are, and ought to remain, the essence of this wonderful land. We stand on guard for thee—and the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Quebec

Tags

addiction, alcoholism, Canada, literature, Quebec

Quebec: the bonfire

I find this scarcely believable myself, so I sympathize with the reader who won’t credit it with truth. For advice on kicking the alcohol addiction, I actually turned to the Consul in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. If you haven’t read it, do; it is one of the 20^th century’s truly great literary novels, filled with vast flights of sheer virtuoso writing; yet its plot summary is hardly magnetic, which is why John Huston’s misguided attempt to film it tanked horribly. Huston claimed to have read over thirty scripts before finding the right one, the one that simply followed the plot. Here’s the plot: a British ex-consul in Mexico is drinking himself to death because his wife left him; his wife returns, yet he continues drinking himself to death, finally succeeding, though in an unexpected manner. The end. Even starring Albert Finney and Jaqueline Bisset, it’s difficult to imagine how such a story could work. Anyway, the Consul, as he’s known throughout (although he is no longer a consul, is indeed extravagantly unemployable), drinks Mescal, an especially nasty form of Tequila with a dead worm in every bottle, for reasons unknown. Ostensibly, he views all other beverages as soft drinks. It’s the Mescal that undoes him, along with drinking it all day and all night, frequently plagued by demons and feeling he’s in the Klippot, a Kabbalistic term referring a realm of shells and satanic forms, a kind of mirror version of the Tree of Life, where all one’s imagined spiritual progress up is, in reality, taking you further down. It is trickier than mere hell, where torments are, well, torments, free of sardonic mockery, obvious. Like all alcoholics, the Consul is forever planning to kick the habit, claiming at one point that he had a foolproof method for doing it, a method that had worked for him many times before. Ignoring the glaring implications of ‘many times before, it was this method that I selected to separate me from Demon Rum. It was admirably simple too: you just sit drinking beer all day and night, and it’s all over in three or four days. You’re off the hard stuff, free and clear, if not exactly clean and sober. As the Consul himself proves – a fact I had failed to notice – the method most emphatically does not work. I sat down in our basement, my eyes, or the 5% left of them, being highly light-sensitive, drinking cases of Guinness, until the stuff made me literally sick, while doing nothing to the craving for something 4% proof or more. After a few days I decided that beer might work in Mexico – a climate thing? – whereas Quebec, with its obsessively French milieu, probably required a soft drink like wine. This being a therapeutic venture, we bought boxes rather than bottles of wine, which I guzzled straight from their faucets. Now, I have never liked cheap red wine. It gives me what used to be called ‘heart burn’ but is now elevated to the term ‘acid reflux’ – and, wow, did my acid reflux down there in the dark, uncomforted by my comforter, lost in vinospace. I was crunching my way through a bottle of Tums a day; and, when I slept (if you can call lapses into unconsciousness ‘sleep’), I would awake with a raging fire like an arc-welding torch in my lower esophagus. The Quebec Method obviously didn’t work either. Thus it was, with Kara’s staunchly loving encouragement that I determined to go it cold turkey, without knowing that you cannot do this safely unless serious medication is also involved. This was when I got my first glimpse of what a motherfucking dangerous drug alcohol actually is. The words of John Lennon’s heroin song kept ringing in my ears: Temperature’s rising, fever is high; can’t see no future, can’t see no sky… And my cold turkey did indeed keep me on the run; I might as well have slept in the toilet – if, that is, sleep were even possible. I began shaking so fearfully that I was forced to crawl up and down the stairs like a baby, or an aged lemur. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and a desperate feeling of dread and panic pressed into my solar plexus with the tangible force of a sword. I had no appetite for food whatsoever, yet still continually threw up something unrecognizable, alien, besides squirting a foul yellow bile from my arse. For four days I did not sleep at all, not a wink, resorting to a massive dose of Nyquill, a truly horrendous over-the-counter alleged sleep aid. Instead of aiding sleep, it made me collapse with disorienting dizziness. True, I had far exceeded the recommended dose, but who knew this store-bought crap was so potent? I’m surprised it isn’t more abused by the type who likes sniffing glue or inhaling gasoline fumes. It definitely fucks you up with equal proficiency. I hear you ask, Why not consult a doctor? This is why not: in Quebec there are no doctors, due to a staggeringly low pay scale, and those that do exist (generally because they’re rubbish or can’t speak English) will either not see you, or else put you on a ten-year waiting list. If you are doctorless and sick, you must take your ailment to the St. Agathe Hospital’s emergency ward, where the average wait-time is ten hours, unless you’re bleeding to death, possibly – they don’t, like the Pentagon, do a body-count. The idea of waiting for ten hours in my shuddering state was simply untenable; so I toughed it out, hallucinating bizarrely from lack of sleep as much as lack of alcohol, haunted by the dread that I was about to die — which, it turns out, I could easily have done, from cerebral aneurism or some such bodily reaction to sudden booze deprivation. I felt so stupendously awful that I couldn’t even smoke. My mouth tasted as if some small creature, a mouse or shrew perhaps, had crept inside to die, using the place as its sarcophagus. After four days, however, miraculously, the symptoms subsided and I was able to sleep, albeit fitfully and wracked by extraordinary nightmares, many of them lucid, ones in which I was conscious of being asleep, yet unable to wake myself. There were ruined labyrinths populated by hostile beings, not quite human, the ground awash in muddy slime, and me, the dreamer, fruitlessly searching for a way out, since Ariadne had left me no thread to follow, and I was far from certain that a way out even existed. At some point, I felt a crack on the head so hard, as if from a metal rod, that I woke up immediately, fearing I’d suffered some cerebral disaster. This happened, with varying severity, several times over the next few days, the shock and reality of the blow always waking me, always making me think some neuron-circuit had blown up. There was another dream in which our house had been invaded by total strangers who were holding a raucous party there, wine bottles spilling, glasses broken on the floor, complete mayhem. I approached one of these strangers and said that I feared I’d had a stroke, on account of the skull cracking. “No,” he told me, “you’re okay. It’s nothing. Have a drink.” It was in this dream-reality that I first realized I actually did not want a drink, indeed found the thought of a drink nauseating. When this self-detox was finally complete, or seemed to be, I felt like someone who had survived a shipwreck and was now safe ashore, wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot cocoa before a roaring fire. The experience had been no different from any account I’ve heard of heroin withdrawal, yet this was only government-sanctioned-and-sold booze, the official, the socially approved drug. I was shocked. I’d had no idea that its dark side was so impenetrably dark, even if Freud’s Death Wish does incline us to play with fire. There was also the book that revealed subtle images of sex and terror, hard cocks and gnashing sharks, air-brushed into ice cubes featured in whiskey ads. You are not supposed to see them – that demolishes any symbol – but the mind registers them subconsciously, making the flame still more attractive to any moth encountering it. I don’t know if the ‘Madmen’ still do this stuff, but, since there are no depths they won’t plumb to sling their products, they might. Check out the ice cubes, especially ones in so-called male magazines. The ones examined in the book were from Playboy, I think. I would have a look for you, but, alas, I can’t do that anymore.

I wanted to share this hooch revelation with friends, but I could sense the disinterest. It was merely my fault for drinking too much – which is probably true – so instead I shut up, concentrating instead upon a regimen of exercise, diet, and, yes, meditation. Ordering from the blind society’s audio library every spiritual text it had, and it had a surprising number of them, I was soon back at my old task of inner enlightenment. Om. After wading through the Old Testament, in which there is precious little spiritual advice, unless you turn to the interpretive genius of Kabbalah, I tried the New, with its conflicting accounts of the same story, and the disturbingly paranoid protestations of St. Paul (who caused riot wherever he went, and was clearly being called a liar by someone with clout), finding, nonetheless, a fair bit of wisdom in what Jesus has to say, when, that is, he isn’t baiting the authorities. But, as I found when writing my book, Journey of the Magi (retitled in the U.S. of A., predictably, In Search of the Birth of Jesus – because books with ‘Jesus’ in their title apparently sell better than ones without it), it is hard to imagine how an entire civilization managed to found itself on such nursery texts. I listened to Juan Mascaro’s superb translation of the Bhagavad Gita some fifteen times, on the other hand, finding there, as I always had in the days of yore, undiluted wisdom and guidance, which one could easily understand as the cornerstone of a great civilization. I found the same true of the Buddhist Dhammapada, where narrative is non-existent, and the sole purpose is to convey tenets of spiritual guidance. Then I turned to more modern sources. I even found great value in the works of Deepak Chopra, who I’d previously assumed to be another charlatan on the make. He’s not, and he provides much interesting scientific data on the proven virtues of meditation. In Krishnamurti, alas – a sage I’d once loved to hear speak, and even on one occasion had lunch with in Bangalore – I found mere sophistry, seemingly profound statements that led nowhere, and were of no help to the seeker, since they denied all methods and practices leading to enlightenment, and disparaged all teachers and gurus. Krishnamurti, who claimed he was not a teacher or guru, while doing nothing but teach and guruize, obviously felt he was the exception to this rule. As a tutor of mine at Oxford, Bill Byrom, once remarked, K. was like a man who has used a ladder to climb into heaven, then pulled it up behind him, denying that any ladder is needed. Indeed, his first book, At the Feet of the Master, recounts his own experiences with his guru, as well as the spiritual disciplines it entailed. So why do we suddenly not need anything of the like? My impression of him over a tete a tete salad (almost tasteless, an oddity in India) was of a tired and disappointed old man, who rambled on about the terrible state of the world, and the vital importance of vegetarianism, yet was strangely lacking in spiritual advice on a personal level. This was strange indeed, since he had just delivered an inspiring talk seemingly full of such advice. His talks were always magnificently eloquent, the product of a razor-sharp mind capable of coming up with apparently irrefutable syllogisms; yet, in retrospect, I usually found, immediately after listening to him, that I had no idea what he’d been talking about. I also disliked his frequently arrogant impatience with anyone asking a question, a tendency that, understandably, discouraged further questions. Like so many gurus, he was not what he appeared to be – something that makes me wonder what or who he actually was, and what he thought he was doing in this world. But when you’re told you are the Messiah in childhood, and then, coming of age, deny that you are, thence finding yourself unfit for any other job than being a Messiah, life is likely to be strange, conflicted, boxes within boxes. After this cosmic let-down, I started listening to very recent writings on Buddhism, by such people as Alan Watts, Joseph Goldstein, and the excellent Dr. Mark Epstein, all of them either scholarly or pragmatic, refreshingly free of religious dogma, yet aligned with leading-edge psychology, and related fields of science. They were stimulating and empathetic, being mostly a mixture of personal experience and practical fact. One could relate to these contemporary seekers in a way impossible to manage with the ancient texts.These works, however, were also to prove my severe undoing – a subject I will save for my next blogarithm, while remaining, always sincerely, Paul William Roberts.

_________***_______

 

 

On New Year’s Eve, 2009, we packed a U-Haul with all our worldly possessions. When I say ‘we’, I mean Kara and her friend, Sandy. I was more fruitfully occupied, buying a firkin of homemade grappa from a friendly restaurateur, under the counter, then a bad but large pizza from the nearest dive on St. Clair Avenue. With 5% vision in one eye, you have to know your routes well and put up with the consequent dearth of choices. I believe a friend of mine came over at some point, and we drank grappa while watching the girls work on the loading. We did share the pizza with them, however. It was a long night, although there appeared to be a brief interlude with champagne to welcome in the year of 2010 (at my age these dates make me feel I’m living in the Roman era rather than the future I had expected from them).

At the crack of dawn, we left Toronto, with Kara driving a huge truck that I was not at all convinced she would be able to drive. But I had my gallon of grappa on hand, so anxiety soon became low on my chart of worries. Now, if you think Montreal is a long five-hour drive from Metro, try it in a big overladen truck. It was night by the time we arrived at the chaos of ongoing construction projects the city likes to imagine as a highway system, and through which Kara had to find her way to a certain ‘Laurentian AutoRoute’—not that any signpost bothered to identify any such road. By now I had drunk myself sober, and was no longer sure whether I had a hangover or simply poisoning from over-proof bathtub grappa, or possibly both. So I drank some more, which seemed to solve whatever problem there may have been.

The AutoRoute Des Laurentides, once we’d divined its existence, proved to be the only decent stretch of highway I’d ever seen in Quebec. Although we had stopped once along the unrelievably dismal 401 East to eat some of the shit that seems to be the only permissible food for long-distance drivers, we were both now very hungry, and we also still had a long way to go. The thing about this highway to the Laurentians, as we soon discovered, is that there is literally nothing on it, nowhere to stop, not even a gas station. It was very dark, too, and snowing. By the time we reached St. Agathe it was late, much later than we’d agreed to meet the owner of the house we were renting, in order to collect the keys. Yet I was under the impression we’d now be there at any minute. No. Val-des-Lacs, our destination, is not as near to St. Agathe as I had somehow thought it to be. It is also not easy to find once you have turned off the final strip of highway, especially during what had become a blizzard. The road is nothing but hairpin bends, some of them indicated, others not. It took us half an hour to reach the metropolis of Val-des-Lacs (one church, one store), yet still we were not at the house. This was when things got complicated and our directions proved useless. What ought to have been ten minutes took half an hour, with the snow falling in a torrent of fat feathers, and a total lack of signposts. Eventually finding the right Chemin, we experienced much trouble with the street numbers. Some were invisible, others did not exist. Finally locating the number preceding our own one, we found that there was no other house for about a mile. But this next house did indeed prove to be ours. Kara turned the truck onto a steep driveway, and as we sped up it the rear wheels suddenly slithered off into some kind of ditch. At least we had arrived, though; and the owner, who lived nearby, did not seem to mind that we were three hours late. She even dragged out her aged father, who brought his tractor to drag us from the ditch, and not without some difficulty. When they spoke together (their English to us was excellent) the language sounded to me like Croatian, Moldavian, or some such East European tongue. It takes quite a while to realize that the rural Quebecois actually speak French – but more of this later.

We loved our new home, although we still had to return to Toronto and pick up our car, besides another truck-load of stuff, which a dear friend, Jamie, was kind enough to drive this time, since Kara had a carload of cats to ferry up herself. Within a week, however, we were finally at home up in the mountains for good.

But was I happy? Nope. And I was drinking at least a bottle of rum every day. Every alcoholic has his or her reasons for resorting to the hooch, and none of them are valid. Not really. But mine were as follows:

My ex-wife died in the middle of divorce proceedings, which are generally a waste of time, since the Law states that all assets must be divided equally – end of story. She did not want to do this, alas, forcing me to spend $70,000 on a lawyer. Her untimely death, one would have thought, ought to have terminated this futile squabble. But oh no. Her brother, named as executor of her will, decided to keep it going. Now, this brother, a real mama’s boy if ever there was one (and we know mama’s feelings about me), has done some fairly unforgiveable things, yet none was worse than actually hiring a bouncer to prevent me from attending his sister’s memorial service, held in what was still technically my own house. Fortunately, my daughter begged me not to come, so I complied. Had I not, however, and found myself manhandled by some 300 pound thug, I could have simply called the police and said that a stranger had threatened me with violence for trying to enter my own house. Respect for the dead and my daughter’s wishes prevented an ugly scene. Yet the brother – possibly disappointed by missing the opportunity to humiliate me – chose to ask friends of mine to leave the gathering instead, embarrassing them horribly in front of many people they knew well, yet also revealing himself as the ignorant asshole he is. For these friends were not just mine, they were also his sister’s friends, and their son was one of my daughter’s particular friends. They had grown up together. All of us had spent the Millennial New Year’s Eve together. We had vacationed together on numerous occasions for twenty years. And this pompous imbecile asks them to leave! Me I can understand, although I still think it shameless and ill-cultured to prevent anyone, even an ex-husband, from mourning the loss of his children’s mother. This was and is the unforgiveable deed. Prolonging the fight over money was merely irksome, unnecessary, and typical of his spectacularly greedy nature. Thus I drank to fend off the anxiety of waiting for the legal solution, since I needed the money that was rightfully mine in order to buy the house we were then renting.

Mediation was eventually decided on, a process for which we had to return to Toronto. A horrible business it is, too. The brother was there, a Scrooge-like spider hunched over the boardroom table, and even having the temerity to say, “Hi, Paul”. I wanted to kick his balding head, but wisely just ignored him. He had even dragged my kids to this ordeal, for no apparent reason beyond malicious coercion. Both parties are asked to sign an agreement that whatever decision is finally reached by the mediation will be binding, a document that, of course, had to be read to me, my hand guided to the signing line. Then the parties retire to separate little rooms, and the Mediator shuttles back and forth with the offers on hand. I looked to my lawyer for advice on what was fair. My daughter was even sent in once to badger me, an act I consider heinous, and presumably the brother’s brainless scheme. At the end of what seemed to be an interminable day, we arrived at what I was advised to consider a just settlement. Whether it was wise to grant my son $200,000 I doubted as a sound idea – a doubt verified now by the fact that he blew the lot on drugs and whores within months of release from jail. My daughter obtained the same, spending it wisely, however – although I was perfectly prepared to finance her education etc. I was, nonetheless, quite content with my share, leaving that sterile legal hellhole joyously, for it was finally over, and I would never have to deal with that greasy toad of a brother again. I also could not wait to get out of Toronto, a place now only of heartache and bad memories.

This was in February. I waited for my check to arrive patiently enough, but since we had already concluded an offer on the house my patience could not afford to be unlimited. I began to phone the lawyer daily, asking if the money had arrived. And the longer I waited the more I drank. It was only in April, I think, that I learned the brother had all the money, and it was he who had to issue my check. Knowing his astounding greed and pettiness, I imagined he would hang on to that cash and gather its interest for as long as possible, if not forever. He is one of those people who loves having money but hates spending it, which is really all you can do with it. He will spend it on property, since that is an investment; yet spending it on such frivolities as a restaurant meal is anathema. It would make him ill (like all assholes, his bowels are a major problem, especially under stress). I was quite surprised to learn that the pinched nose, admirably suiting his pinched nature, was actually a nose-job; and that his mother and sister had their noses done by the same plastic surgeon, possibly in a three-for-two deal. Early photos do indeed reveal quite a beak, but each to his own. My concern was that he still had my own. It took legal threats finally to squeeze that check out of him, which was couriered up me in May, nearly four months late, but just in time to buy our lovely little house. I pictured the agony on his face at having to write so large a check to me, of all people. His bowels must have been churning like the fabled ocean of milk, his hair falling out in hanks, the sweat on his brow like tears of Niobe. But I think that is enough of him forever, no? I suspect I’ve made my feelings about the so-called man clear.

Now we settled into our new house and new life happily ever after. Didn’t we? Well, not quite. First I had to deal with what had clearly become a drinking problem – whereas before it had seemed more like a drinking solution. I had no reason to guzzle anymore, and imagined I could now just stop. I was, I began to notice on country walks, in diabolically bad shape, and the drinking was not so easy to stop. Then the demons emerged, as if annoyed by the fact that my life was no longer so sufficiently plagued. But this will have to wait until the next bloggishness. I remain, always sincerely, Paul William Roberts.

Quebec

Tags

death, divorce, family, Laurentians, lawyers, marriage, moving, Quebec

            On New Year’s Eve, 2009, we packed a U-Haul with all our worldly possessions. When I say ‘we’, I mean Kara and her friend, Sandy. I was more fruitfully occupied, buying a firkin of homemade grappa from a friendly restaurateur, under the counter, then a bad but large pizza from the nearest dive on St. Clair Avenue. With 5% vision in one eye, you have to know your routes well and put up with the consequent dearth of choices. I believe a friend of mine came over at some point, and we drank grappa while watching the girls work on the loading. We did share the pizza with them, however. It was a long night, although there appeared to be a brief interlude with champagne to welcome in the year of 2010 (at my age these dates make me feel I’m living in the Roman era rather than the future I had expected from them).

            At the crack of dawn, we left Toronto, with Kara driving a huge truck that I was not at all convinced she would be able to drive. But I had my gallon of grappa on hand, so anxiety soon became low on my chart of worries. Now, if you think Montreal is a long five-hour drive from Metro, try it in a big overladen truck. It was night by the time we arrived at the chaos of ongoing construction projects the city likes to imagine as a highway system, and through which Kara had to find her way to a certain ‘Laurentian AutoRoute’—not that any signpost bothered to identify any such road. By now I had drunk myself sober, and was no longer sure whether I had a hangover or simply poisoning from over-proof bathtub grappa, or possibly both. So I drank some more, which seemed to solve whatever problem there may have been.

            The AutoRoute Des Laurentides, once we’d divined its existence, proved to be the only decent stretch of highway I’d ever seen in Quebec. Although we had stopped once along the unrelievably dismal 401 East to eat some of the shit that seems to be the only permissible food for long-distance drivers, we were both now very hungry, and we also still had a long way to go. The thing about this highway to the Laurentians, as we soon discovered, is that there is literally nothing on it, nowhere to stop, not even a gas station. It was very dark, too, and snowing. By the time we reached St. Agathe it was late, much later than we’d agreed to meet the owner of the house we were renting, in order to collect the keys. Yet I was under the impression we’d now be there at any minute. No. Val-des-Lacs, our destination, is not as near to St. Agathe as I had somehow thought it to be. It is also not easy to find once you have turned off the final strip of highway, especially during what had become a blizzard. The road is nothing but hairpin bends, some of them indicated, others not. It took us half an hour to reach the metropolis of Val-des-Lacs (one church, one store), yet still we were not at the house. This was when things got complicated and our directions proved useless. What ought to have been ten minutes took half an hour, with the snow falling in a torrent of fat feathers, and a total lack of signposts. Eventually finding the right Chemin, we experienced much trouble with the street numbers. Some were invisible, others did not exist. Finally locating the number preceding our own one, we found that there was no other house for about a mile. But this next house did indeed prove to be ours. Kara turned the truck onto a steep driveway, and as we sped up it the rear wheels suddenly slithered off into some kind of ditch. At least we had arrived, though; and the owner, who lived nearby, did not seem to mind that we were three hours late. She even dragged out her aged father, who brought his tractor to drag us from the ditch, and not without some difficulty. When they spoke together (their English to us was excellent) the language sounded to me like Croatian, Moldavian, or some such East European tongue. It takes quite a while to realize that the rural Quebecois actually speak French – but more of this later.

            We loved our new home, although we still had to return to Toronto and pick up our car, besides another truck-load of stuff, which a dear friend, Jamie, was kind enough to drive this time, since Kara had a carload of cats to ferry up herself. Within a week, however, we were finally at home up in the mountains for good.

            But was I happy? Nope. And I was drinking at least a bottle of rum every day. Every alcoholic has his or her reasons for resorting to the hooch, and none of them are valid. Not really. But mine were as follows:

            My ex-wife died in the middle of divorce proceedings, which are generally a waste of time, since the Law states that all assets must be divided equally – end of story. She did not want to do this, alas, forcing me to spend $70,000 on a lawyer. Her untimely death, one would have thought, ought to have terminated this futile squabble. But oh no. Her brother, named as executor of her will, decided to keep it going. Now, this brother, a real mama’s boy if ever there was one (and we know mama’s feelings about me), has done some fairly unforgivable things, yet none was worse than actually hiring a bouncer to prevent me from attending his sister’s memorial service, held in what was still technically my own house. Fortunately, my daughter begged me not to come, so I complied. Had I not, however, and found myself manhandled by some 300 pound thug, I could have simply called the police and said that a stranger had threatened me with violence for trying to enter my own house. Respect for the dead and my daughter’s wishes prevented an ugly scene. Yet the brother – possibly disappointed by missing the opportunity to humiliate me – chose to ask friends of mine to leave the gathering instead, embarrassing them horribly in front of many people they knew well, yet also revealing himself as the ignorant asshole he is. For these friends were not just mine, they were also his sister’s friends, and their son was one of my daughter’s particular friends. They had grown up together. All of us had spent the Millennial New Year’s Eve together. We had vacationed together on numerous occasions for twenty years. And this pompous imbecile asks them to leave! Me I can understand, although I still think it shameless and ill-cultured to prevent anyone, even an ex-husband, from mourning the loss of his children’s mother. This was and is the unforgivable deed. Prolonging the fight over money was merely irksome, unnecessary, and typical of his spectacularly greedy nature. Thus I drank to fend off the anxiety of waiting for the legal solution, since I needed the money that was rightfully mine in order to buy the house we were then renting.

            Mediation was eventually decided on, a process for which we had to return to Toronto. A horrible business it is, too. The brother was there, a Scrooge-like spider hunched over the boardroom table, and even having the temerity to say, “Hi, Paul”. I wanted to kick his balding head, but wisely just ignored him. He had even dragged my kids to this ordeal, for no apparent reason beyond malicious coercion. Both parties are asked to sign an agreement that whatever decision is finally reached by the mediation will be binding, a document that, of course, had to be read to me, my hand guided to the signing line. Then the parties retire to separate little rooms, and the Mediator shuttles back and forth with the offers on hand. I looked to my lawyer for advice on what was fair. My daughter was even sent in once to badger me, an act I consider heinous, and presumably the brother’s brainless scheme. At the end of what seemed to be an interminable day, we arrived at what I was advised to consider a just settlement. Whether it was wise to grant my son $200,000 I doubted as a sound idea – a doubt verified now by the fact that he blew the lot on drugs and whores within months of release from jail. My daughter obtained the same, spending it wisely, however – although I was perfectly prepared to finance her education etc. I was, nonetheless, quite content with my share, leaving that sterile legal hellhole joyously, for it was finally over, and I would never have to deal with that greasy toad of a brother again. I also could not wait to get out of Toronto, a place now only of heartache and bad memories.

            This was in February. I waited for my check to arrive patiently enough, but since we had already concluded an offer on the house my patience could not afford to be unlimited. I began to phone the lawyer daily, asking if the money had arrived. And the longer I waited the more I drank. It was only in April, I think, that I learned the brother had all the money, and it was he who had to issue my check. Knowing his astounding greed and pettiness, I imagined he would hang on to that cash and gather its interest for as long as possible, if not forever. He is one of those people who loves having money but hates spending it, which is really all you can do with it. He will spend it on property, since that is an investment; yet spending it on such frivolities as a restaurant meal is anathema. It would make him ill (like all assholes, his bowels are a major problem, especially under stress). I was quite surprised to learn that the pinched nose, admirably suiting his pinched nature, was actually a nose-job; and that his mother and sister had their noses done by the same plastic surgeon, possibly in a three-for-two deal. Early photos do indeed reveal quite a beak, but each to his own. My concern was that he still had my own. It took legal threats finally to squeeze that check out of him, which was couriered up me in May, nearly four months late, but just in time to buy our lovely little house. I pictured the agony on his face at having to write so large a check to me, of all people. His bowels must have been churning like the fabled ocean of milk, his hair falling out in hanks, the sweat on his brow like tears of Niobe. But I think that is enough of him forever, no? I suspect I’ve made my feelings about the so-called man clear.

            Now we settled into our new house and new life happily ever after. Didn’t we? Well, not quite. First I had to deal with what had clearly become a drinking problem – whereas before it had seemed more like a drinking solution. I had no reason to guzzle anymore, and imagined I could now just stop. I was, I began to notice on country walks, in diabolically bad shape, and the drinking was not so easy to stop. Then the demons emerged, as if annoyed by the fact that my life was no longer so sufficiently plagued. But this will have to wait until the next bloggishness.

I remain, always sincerely,

Paul William Roberts.