Chapter Eleven:
Eternal Damnation
In July of 1995, When I arrived at the airport in Saskatoon, home from Japan, my parents were there to pick me up, with both of my sisters and our black labrador retriever, Max. I was so relieved to see my family! I wanted to tell them all about my troubles in Japan,... about how I had been anxious for so long, and how terrible I had felt,... I wanted to tell them, but,... I couldn’t. I was simultaneously worried about what people, namely my sisters, and my dad, would think of me, and I was also worried about my “secret” getting out,....
We drove back to Prince Albert, and I was extremely relieved to be home. I hoped desperately that arriving home would, somehow, cure me of my anxiety, and it did, in some ways,— for a while. I saw Grandma Lilly right away and we embraced and cried in each others’ arms. It was sad. Especially sad for me, ( I thought), because I was mourning the loss of my Grandpa George and also simultaneously struggling to come to grips with my experiences while in Japan, the year of the great studying opportunity that I had secretly squandered!
The funeral for my grandfather took place, and we all mourned his passing. I enrolled in University classes in Prince Albert at the off-campus facilities of the University of Saskatchewan,, and classes were to start in early September. I was determined to get high marks and become a lawyer. I had already told a lot of people about that plan, and it was strange,... because as soon as I said I was going to do something, I felt an annoying (but very real) pressure to really do it or else,.... (I was a liar…?) What would people think of me if I didn’t follow through with what I said I was going to do? I decided that in order to do as well as possible academically, that I was not going to do any hunting that fall. My buddies were surprised. I thought it was a good idea, but it was a challenge to stop hunting that fall, in order to be “successful….” Indeed it was rather extreme and excessive and after a year or so I took up my hunting again, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and it helped me cope with my life to a great extent.
In October of 1995, I turned 19 years old. I was extremely happy to be of legal drinking age because alcohol was a major source of relief and it provided physiological as well as mental and emotional respite for me. Alcohol was, I had discovered, a loyal and dependable companion that didn’t judge or scoff at me and I cherished its immediate, soothing effects, and saw little recourse but to drink it. Alcohol never cancelled its appointments or changed its mind about getting together, either,... I naturally wanted to drink often and I would have drank all day, every day, (and every night) if I could have…. Alcohol simply made me feel far better. Life was much better, under the influence…. My thoughts were quieter and far less intrusive and there was way less anxiety, but sobriety was becoming a very different story.
Alcohol is an important factor in my story, and volumes could be written by me, vis a vis the role alcohol played as a personal aid and a comforter for me from the time I was about 19 until I was about 30. It seems to be a common attitude and an almost unwritten kind of rule in most narratives, that alcohol simply causes problems, especially for people with mental or emotional problems…. I think it is far more complicated than it is made out to be, and I have to say that I think it is critical to look at the consumption of alcohol from the Humanistic perspective and specifically from the viewpoint of how alcohol can greatly aid people in (temporarily) feeling safe and secure. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a tool that I think is extremely useful in understanding the process and stages of Human needs, and I think Maslow was very apt in his understanding of the critical role of psychological safety in human wellness. If we look at the hierarchy, we see that according to Maslow there are five stages to Human needs and levels of development, and satisfaction. One cannot fulfill the higher levels of needs, without fulfilling, first, the lower level(s). OCD is an assault of the second stage of these basic needs,... the super-critical psychological safety and security needs! The implications of this fact are obvious and they are, in real-life, every bit as pronounced as they might seem in this chapter, or in theory. OCD is an activation of the amygdala and the fight, flight, or freeze system of the brain. With this hijacking of that system, all of the other levels of needs become impossible to satisfy or focus on, and are therefore made irrelevant! But, when I had consumed a few drinks of alcohol I would invariable (and almost miraculously) feel infinitely more secure, and then because I had the second level of psychological safety and security needs suddenly met, and I would sit in my room, with remarkable focus, and passionately practice the violin, scales, lots of double stop scales, for 4 hours a day,..., 7 days a week from early January of 1998 until April of 1998, as well as go to my classes and complete all of my assignments—. But—- take away the alcohol and I struggled to get any kind of quality concentration!! With OCD, as with all anxiety disorders, the presence of crippling anxiety affects our second tier of basic needs, which are our psychological safety/security needs. When we are experiencing thoughts and a physiological response that causes us to feel fundamentally unsafe, we cannot advance forward on to the three levels of personal development and personal “needs,” until we have satisfied those more fundamental security needs. The importance of this basic and fundamental truth cannot be overstated.
I studied a great deal in my first year of university, enrolling in five classes which included, English 110, Psychology 110, Sociology 110, Native Studies 110, and Geography 110. All I had to do was get good marks in all of my classes, my mother did all of my laundry as well as the cooking for my dad and I and herself. I never used the stove to cook and I never used the iron to iron my shirts. These activities, among many other things, were triggers for my OCD, later on, beginning in the summer of 1998. I never saw any girls or went on any dates. I wanted a girlfriend, that was certain, but I was still extremely anxious around girls in a “dating” scenario.
In March of 1996, I got into an argument with my parents and I decided to move out to my Grandma Lilly’s house. I was fed up with my parents,.... We argued a lot. They were frowning on my proclivity for drinking alcohol and that was extremely upsetting for me. I was very irritable, and I think most people would have been, with that reality of constant pressure and constant nagging thoughts and anxieties. Again, I was actually very frustrated with myself,... why was I worried about the irrational? Why did I need to be drinking all the time? Why was I doing these things? Why did I feel so anxious and flustered all the time? This is a core problem with OCD— Being ashamed. I think it’s part of the illness, having shame and guilt and anxiety are symptoms of OCD….and all of this creates a great deal of confusion and fear.
During that first year of my university studies, I took five full classes, and again, I was studying University classes in Prince Albert at the off-Campus facilities for the University of Saskatchewan. The Campus was actually located in Saskatoon, but some classes were offered in off-campus settings and it had turned out that I could study my first year classes for my Arts and Sciences degree, in Prince Albert. This meant several things: I didn’t go to the city of Saskatoon, and instead, I stayed at home with my parents, and so there was no living with roommates, or going to a new and unfamiliar city. There was no big move to Saskatoon which is a city of about 150,000 people, a far cry from Prince Albert’s 30,000. I mean, let’s be honest here: Prince Albert has a population of around 30,000 and of that 30,000 there are many people who are unemployed and who have substance abuse problems. Saskatoon has the University Campus and with that alone, there were nearly 30,000 people just going to the University. The University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon created a great deal of activity in Saskatoon and a great many newly arriving young people poured onto campus each fall. This meant several things: it meant that those young people were going to socialize, drink beer, dance, have relationships,..., and yes, it meant that those people were going to have sex! But I wasn’t part of any of that– I had decided to stay home in Prince Albert instead. I wanted to be a part of all of that, and to make all kinds of interesting friends, but I was scared of what my mind might do, especially, If and when I ever had sex,.... The irony of that decision, to stay in Prince Albert was that I really genuinely yearned for social interactions. I wanted intimacy, and friendships and social interactions, but at the same time I remembered the panic in Japan and I was leery of the unknown, and leery of new experiences and what potential anxieties they might arouse.
In March 1996, after moving out to Grandma Lilly’s house, I was shoveling the snow off the walks, one sunny day, when I thought, rather suddenly, about the pine needles that lay on the walkways and covered the ground. I thought to myself:
“What if, (I worried, that) I could get HIV from touching a pine needle?”
I noticed the thought and it kind of just sat there, and I felt the traces of anxiety and panic faintly brewing in my mind/body,.... I reflected on this,.... (That thinking and anxious reaction was OCD) What was up with that? It was ominous and foreboding,.... I hoped I wouldn’t become suddenly severely discombobulated like I had been in Japan.
I finished my first year of university and prepared to move out to Calgary for my summer job. I moved, and began to work as a Japanese speaking tour guide in the Calgary and Banff area. I went out one night for a drink or two with a friend and met a lady, we went back to my place,... and,... well,...I lost my virginity! The next day, though, I had the question that I had always worried I would worry about,... begin to flicker and flash across my mind:
“What if I have HIV/AIDS?”
Ooo! I hated the thought!
“But that is impossible!” I told myself….
“But,...,” I would think, “Anything is (really) possible,...”
And then a few moments later I would think:
“There’s a first time for everything!”
(even though they said Aids wasn’t passed by kissing, they might be wrong, and then they might not know all of the different factors and various exceptions to all of the rules, maybe,... and I might be the first person to prove something new about the virus, that it really was easier than people thought to spread and to catch,....)
And:
“It would be just my luck!”
“I can’t be 100% certain, unless I get tested,....”
This cycle of thinking persisted, these same thoughts were still there, with each new day, and I would go to it when I had free time, while driving between Banff and Jasper or when I was doing a menial task like drying the dishes, and I would dive back in and wrestle with the thoughts, and it was very unpleasant because with the wrestling came feelings of intense distress. Feelings of intense anxiety and panic. I was really beginning to worry, because everytime I had the intrusive thoughts I would meticulously strive to go over every minute detail of the sexual encounter in my mind (this is a type of compulsion commonly known as mental reviewing or rumination), I remembered that I had taken all the recommended precautions, during my sexual encounter, and, that included, asking all of the prudent pre- screening questions,.... Yet, I was still filled with that familiar guilty, panic-stricken kind of feeling of all encompassing doubt and doom, the very same one I had felt at different times while growing up and I hated it.
In the fall of 1996, much to my parents' dismay, I canceled my second year of university,... I was (secretly) extremely distraught, and I (naturally) thought (and felt) that I had to, somehow, get rid of these intrusive thoughts and uncomfortable feelings,.... I made a plan with a friend I had met at work. We were going to work at Sun Peaks ski resort near Kamloops, British Columbia. All the while, I thought (obsessed and ruminated), daily, (even hourly) about the idea of being HIV positive. This act of worrying about a certain concept or idea is the act of obsessing, especially if there is substantial anxiety present with the thought, and there always was, and the act of trying to argue with the obsession and prove to yourself that it will never happen is a mental compulsion. I would find myself continuously trying to answer the incessant barrage of questions and discourse that popped into my mind causing me an inordinate amount of angst and emotional dysregulation:
“What would you do,... if…,”
What If ______…… … ?”
“Would that be my fault ? ? ? …. ….. …. ? ? ?
As I took it upon myself to delve into each new worry, I noticed, in short order, that as quickly as I seemed to find an answer to the worry at hand, a new worry would somehow just appear to replace the old one, without fail, within minutes,....
I was extremely troubled by this cycle of mental events. What was I to do? Go get tested for HIV? I really hadn’t even taken any risks, but I felt so worried. So ashamed. So ridiculous,.... Sadly, this pattern of mental events became my life for the next 26 years. From 1995, until 2021.
I drank alcohol every night,...and it actually helped with the anxiety with marked efficacy. If anyone had something to say about my drinking, I became extremely angry and if not outwardly, then inwardly, indignant. After all, it was easy for people to comment about my outer life’s appearances, and to make assumptions about my life and then give their comments and give their opinions, when they really hadn’t the faintest clue as to what my reality was really like! Hell hath no fury like that fury I felt toward those who did this, and there were many who did! I didn’t know what to do, and the anger and frustration toward people who gave their (uncalled for and ill-informed) opinions about my actions and life-choices didn’t ease my situation whatsoever. That’s one of the hardest things about OCD,..., the feelings you get in your body, of distress, and discomfort, are 100% real. You feel extremely poorly, just from thinking about something,.. and that is a very difficult thing to get used to, actually I don’t know that one can ever get used to it. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, you suffer the humiliation and fury of people all telling you (often times, rather flippantly and glibly,) what you should be doing instead, and you think to yourself:
“If only you could live for one day in my shoes, and know the despair and panic I feel, panic that turns seconds into eternity,...! You wouldn’t be giving me that advice, and you wouldn’t have that subtle air of moral superiority either….”
I worked at Sun Peaks ski resort that winter. I remember thinking several times a day, every single day, about having AIDS, no matter where I was or what I was officially supposed to be doing…. I pretended to be happy and carefree, or normal, but there was no stopping the thoughts or the anxiety that they triggered. If I was on my way to work, or on my way home, or having a beer with friends,... I thought, “What if I have AIDS?” and then I tried to come up with an answer, once and for all…. No matter how I thought of it, or how I reassured myself, I kept imagining scenarios where I was infected and I unknowingly infected somebody with the AIDS virus, thereby ruining their life. I felt terrible about all of it,.... That none of it was based on any kind of logic or fact! That I was seemingly powerless over my mind and body. I felt more and more that I would do anything to get rid of these obsessions,..., indeed, it haunted me, as had other obsessions haunted me at other times in my life, and I felt like the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Tell Tale Heart,” who confesses to a murder through the course of the poem and to his being driven “mad” by his compulsions to kill his neighbour, because of some oddity in his eye,...!
It is interesting to note that fear of HIV, according to my research, became a very common theme for many people with OCD. One fellow, David Adam, a scientific journalist in the United Kingdom, wrote a book called The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, about how that particular obsession, of infection with HIV, troubled him to an inordinate degree and drastically impacted his life. My research indicates HIV was a very common obsession. I think the topic of HIV was particularly triggering because of the stigma that surrounded the AIDS virus. It had a sexual connotation as well as a deviant aspect to it because of intravenous drug users and Homo sexuality. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I am not Homophobic, but still I worried about HIV. I think it also had to do with the aspect of uncertainty, that one couldn’t be 100% certain of their HIV status unless they got tested for it. The intolerance for uncertainty is said to be one of the main characteristics of OCD. I can confirm that. Over the years I have gotten the anxious feelings of OCD when I wasn’t sure of a minute detail of a certain object that I owned, like specifically, when I could not remember something absolutely clearly…. You could call it “Memory” or “recall” OCD, it has happened many times when I tried to recall, but could not, how a certain thing looks, or how the parts of an object fit together. I have felt that I was going to “go mad,” (lose my mind, etc.,) if I couldn’t know or remember certain things perfectly. That is a very inconvenient and debilitating situation to find one’s self in. It cannot be overstated. That was and still can be a challenge for me, but not very often. One could call it “need to know OCD.” This type of OCD could and still can manifest on any subject matter, it’s an intense feeling of anxiety stemming from a thought or a perception or the combination of thought and perception and then the natural desire or urge to make the anxious feelings go away….
No matter what I did, I couldn’t let go of the idea of HIV. I began to get depressed, and I dreaded having any further sexual encounters. I was concerned to a great degree about what I was going to do to escape this dilemma. “What if these thoughts and worries never went away?” That was the biggest question…. It was beyond Hell. Life became an endless cycle of the same torturous events every. single. day.
Every morning in 1998, I would wake up and the same mental events would transpire: I would always, immediately, scan for the thoughts of my obsession from the day before, then, I’d immediately begin trying to “problem solve and ruminate...,” grappling to think of the problem from a logical perspective which was, in the case of HIV, “I can only really be sure that I don’t have HIV if I get tested,” then I would remember and reflect on the unlikelihood of having any sexually transmitted disease because of the precautions I took while having sex, and how painstakingly careful I had been, and I would feel waves of shame and guilt and confusion. Unfortunately, even with different themes and topics of obsessions in 1998 and onward for the next twenty years, I endured the same course of events,....Then, on top of it all, I would think of the demoralizing idea of going to university lectures (or work) that day, (and for the rest of my life,...), and I would think, even if I didn’t want to, about having to be a “man,” and having to be “successful,....”
Oftentimes I would think of people whom I had met, who were particularly disagreeable and mean spirited, the kind who would look for a person’s deepest and darkest secret or insecurity and then endeavour to bring it up at the worst and most painful times, just to hurt that person, and I would imagine, if those people could, somehow, know my feelings of shame and fear, and they could know all of the shame and fear triggered by irrational and sometimes bogus ideas, that I had felt and thought over time, that they would laugh and revel in my misery, and make fun of me for it, and then I would feel even worse! And on and on my thoughts would spiral, and I would go back to the beginning, to the original obsession of the day... “What if I have HIV?,... What if I infected someone and ruined their life?….”
In my desperate and unending search for escape from this hell, I read articles and books almost incessantly. One phrase and concept that really resonated with me, was coined by philosopher Fredrich Neitszhe, in his book The Will To Power, and it was the concept of the “eternal recurrence.” David Adams in his book about OCD and his struggle with the fear of HIV, likened his struggle to the struggle of the Greek God Sisyphus, who, according to Greek mythology, was punished by Zeus, and sentenced to a life of repeatedly pushing a gigantic boulder up a mountain in the depths of Hell and when he reached the top, the boulder rolled back down to the bottom and he had to push it up, again, for all of eternity. That struggle was an apt description of the struggle I had with my obsessions and compulsions, and it was an “eternal recurrence" and, I feel, it is the perfect analogy of life with obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
The ski season came to an end and I planned on going back to Prince Albert for the summer. I had grown a beard. I thought maybe, if I had a beard, I might somehow be more relaxed. It was worth a try. I had started making plans to go on a long-distance canoe expedition with a couple different friends. My reasoning was pure and simple: I wanted to stop worrying and obsessing, about AIDS and about everything! I was ashamed of my entire mental world. I reasoned that perhaps if I flooded myself with stressful situations, like being in the middle of remote Northern Saskatchewan Wilderness, with one other person and having to navigate our way through the wilderness, through dangerous waterways filled with treacherous waterfalls and rapidly moving sections of river filled with all manners of hazards, back to civilization, risking death by starvation or drowning or bear attack or any other thing that could possibly happen, that maybe I would finally somehow discard my tendency to be anxious, to ruminate, and to worry. It was worth believing. I needed a miracle, Oh Lord, how I needed a miracle, and I poured my focus toward the canoe trips that might bring with them the long awaited emancipation for which I desperately searched.
I planned the canoe trip. I suppose I reasoned it this way: I was experiencing extreme anxiety and panic on a daily basis, and so, I thought, (naturally) that I needed to try harder, to toughen myself and to do a series of actions to make myself different, so that I would no longer have these thoughts and feelings–. I was so young! Only 20 years old, and all of these unpleasant thoughts and feelings were relatively new to me, after all, they had only just begun in 1995, January, and so, in total, it was only a little over two years’ time. I was still quite optimistic that there was some kind of technique or experience that I could find that would cause me to change and in that same line of thinking cause me to be free of these thought-feeling travails,....(it would be twenty six years of struggling and experimenting before I finally got lasting periods of cessation of these unpleasant occurrences. In those 26 years, I did an incredible amount of personal and psychological explorations and challenges. I pushed myself to try the most daunting things I could think of, and I moved across the world in order to do it all– this entire process was vast in scale and in scope, but it would prove to be the ultimate in real and true “education!”)
The canoe trip I was planning was designed to be a long, sprawling voyage, from Northern Saskatchewan at Wollaston Lake, up into the Northwest Territories. I had told many people I was going to do it,... and now, as was the custom with me, I felt immense and somewhat annoying pressure, from my mind, to go, simply because I had said that I would…. (This is another characteristic of my psyche and neurodivergence, namely, the overriding desire to never look like, or appear to be, a person who is immoral, or insincere, or disrespectful in such a way that they would be telling lies or saying things that they never really planned on doing,....) but, I was also very nervous and apprehensive about the voyage. I had never done anything like it before, with or without my dad…. Even with dad, I had never done anything near that scale. It was a foolish plan, in some ways, many ways, but I refused to give up on it. Afterall, it was the possibility of mental emancipation! Still, there I was, obsessing about HIV (and worried about my obsessing) and simultaneously, I was planning on going on an extremely remote white water canoe trip with my friend who also was not that experienced of a canoeist or a navigator. After all, we were young, and lacking life experience, but I was desperate to fix myself from my predicament of perpetual panic.
In the end, we filled our packs with macaroni and juice crystals and gorp (trail-mix) and all manner of things…. In preparation to navigate the (potentially) perilous rivers, I had traveled to Madawaska River Canoe school, in Ontario, to take a course in whitewater canoeing at a reputable whitewater canoe school. It is important to note that I could have gone to Lac La Ronge, which is only about a 2.5 hour’s drive from Prince Albert, but I hated the thought of it. This was part of my problem too…. I was so ashamed of myself for my main problem, I was actually extremely angry at the whole situation, even then, and I didn’t want to be around people I knew, or people from the small town that I was from, either friends or relatives. With each person I saw and interacted or conversed with the fact that I was the one who was in distress, was seared deeper into my soul, and I didn’t want the added stress of having to worry about running into anybody I knew, and then to have to put on an act— it was too exhausting and humiliating. Putting on an act, for people I knew- whether they were acquaintances or relatives– was too much work and it was too infuriating– the truth was too painful and it needed addressing, but I felt that everyone in my community was unapproachable and that again made me furious! The way I saw things, it wasn’t supposed to be that way! People in my family and community-( including family members) were supposed to be approachable– they were supposed to be my tribe, and I was supposed to feel comfortable to approach, even just one person, and even if it brought me to tears, I was supposed to be able to pour the contents of my heart out to them and then to get help from them, but unfortunately, it wasn’t like that, and I didn’t have that option, and it made me angry and ashamed, and sad nearly beyond words, and so, I went to a canoe school that was over two days’ (48 hours) train-ride away. When your family and relatives and community become a stressor and not a source of reprieve, that is when life begins to become extremely hard….- because your home is not a place of sanctuary but rather a place of stress and agitation…. (This feeling that I couldn’t approach family caused me to begin to resent many of my relatives, and it made my struggle exponentially harder, and caused me to move away eventually, in 2001.)
The logic for taking the canoe course was simple: if I took a course, then I would be (theoretically) “qualified” to canoe in the whitewater,.... The only problem with this is that it is completely untrue. The mind will think of a million statements about “qualifications” and how things will be or should be– but all of that discourse is simply thought– simply theory. This theory exists, but only in the mind–. None of it is true. What I was hoping for was to be free from anxiety, and I hoped that taking a course would give me that freedom– but, it didn’t. We loaded our canoe onto Dad’s Landcruiser and my dad drove us to our starting point, way up to Wollaston Lake, Saskatchewan, near Points North Landing and we camped there, overnight with dad and a neighbour of ours who came along for the ride. The next day, dad and our neighbour, Phil, left for the long ride (10 hours) back home and my friend and I began our voyage.
My friend’s name is Lee Waters. He and I met at Sun Peaks Ski Resort in the fall of 1996. Lee is a talented fellow with a charismatic disposition and a zest for life, with a knack for skiing, and a knack also, for music, and we had hit it off immediately, and we had many great times during the ski season of 1996-1997. We even formed a music duo and performed several times at the Stumbock lodge at mid mountain, for guests at a night-ski event,..., those were some amazing times, actually, and I must pause here and tell you a little about them because they were “life changing!”
Back in those times, we worked as lift attendants on Ralph Zimmerman’s* (pseudonym) lift crew. Around Christmas time in 1996, Ralph announced to all of us on his crew that he wanted to have a potluck party and asked us all if we would be interested in attending. Now, we were a large crew of about 15 members, and we were all about the ages of 18-24, and we were a good bunch who were full of vim and vigour and we were eager for a good party. So, we told Ralph we wanted to have the party and we all agreed to prepare an item of food for the dinner.
I had planned on taking a fried-rice dish, and everyone had something tasty that they brought. We were all young and excited and looking for love and adventure, and for me, the party couldn’t come soon enough! The night of the party came quickly and I went with great anticipation and excitement. There were many in attendance on the starry cold December night, up on Todd Mountain, and we had been instructed to bring our appetites, our musical instruments, and beer– lots of beer…. And we did.
Attending the party that night were a blend of great characters. There was a young lady named Jazz, who had thoughtful blue eyes and a relaxed and gentle voice and then, there was young David Jackson from New Brunswick with a thick black head of hair and little trademark goatee,..., and then, there was the lead hand, Chris Roy who was a jolly fellow and a real mood-maker, he was a good guitar player too, and then there were several more lift-ees and millwrights- (lift-mechanics) and ski-patrollers as well! It was great because all of the three departments that worked together had a chance to meet in a social setting and enjoy some time discovering the different aspects of one another’s personas. To this day, that evening turned out to be one of the greatest gatherings I ever experienced,....
About an hour into the party, a large (marijuana and tobacco) joint began to be designed and expertly rolled up for the smoking, and I, although initially refusing, when offered the glowing cherry-fire, did shortly thereafter succumb to peer pressure and taking the joint in my hand I drew and inhaled deeply, the cannabis and tobacco blend…. I sipped my beer and visited and curiously monitored my state of consciousness,.... I took out my violin and began to play a few notes, and then to jam with Chris Roy and Lee Waters, and we made some great sounds. We smoked and drank and feasted fiercely, and the marijuanna had a wonderful soothing and also an amplifying effect on me. I found myself pleasantly able to focus more than I ever usually would on the music, and also found my perceptions and senses far more acute and enjoyable and my thoughts a source of entertainment but with added meaning and significance…. We now played with a special kind of intensity.
We played many tunes including a couple of my own compositions. From the party came the foundation for Lee’s and my friendship and I even moved in with him and his folks, Roy and Inge of Kamloops, British Columbia, for the remainder of the ski season in 1997. I was blessed to meet so many wonderful folks, and Lee and I had a great many commonalities and together we enjoyed a lot of interesting and stimulating conversations and we also accepted an offer to go and perform at the Stumbok Lounge once a week on Wednesday evenings. The venue consisted of guests (many from Germany) dining on a delicious Prime- Rib dinner washed down with large quantities of wonderful ales and wines, and Lee and I were the chosen entertainers!
Our performance setup was very simple. I played the fiddle (violin) and Lee played the guitar. We played a few tunes that we had rehearsed beforehand, mostly lively-paced Metis-style fiddle tunes. We would ride the lift up to the gig and get all tuned and warmed up. Our tuning and warming up also consisted of a kind of ceremony within which we would smoke a good amount of cannabis and drink a good quantity of beer. Then we would begin our sets. We sat in the midst of a crowd of perhaps 50 people, dressed in ski wear and speaking in foreign tongues. I played the tunes from the times of old- the songs of the early settlers and the people of the buffalo, and the violin bow fell deftly onto the strings of steel and there arose, a sound— clear and sweet and the crowds absolutely loved it! Lee sat to my side and diligently strummed to the tunes giving backing and depth to the merry tunes: Tunes like The Lucky Trappers’ Reel and The Rooster on the fence, and Black-Coat Johnny! The spectators began to throw generous tips into a hat, that had been placed out in front of us and they began to rise up out of their seats to get up and dance, despite wearing ski boots- and they would dance and look over occasionally, their faces smiling happily– and even the chef - - a tall and slim persian fellow, would, being pleasantly stoned, and taken by the situation– dance as if no one was watching– leaping and gliding gracefully, like a real original Mr. Bojangles! I never, even to this day, experienced as fantastic a gig, as those at the Ol’ Stumbok…. The people, the music, the setting— it was otherworldly! After experiencing those nights at the stumbok, I was determined to return to Sun Peaks that fall and to continue the musical performances- but my anxiety and distressing thoughts got in the way, and I never ventured back. Now,... back to the Canoe trip:
We pushed off shore and began making our way up the shoreline of Wollaston Lake. There was still ice on the lake and we paddled in the 5-10 meters’ width of open water along the shoreline. I was immediately apprehensive about our situation. I took the map out of its case and began to study it. I had difficulty seeing our position. I tried to hide my anxiety. We continued on. A couple of hours later we hit solid ice. We beached the canoe and started walking the shoreline. Our original plan was to canoe up Wollaston lake and then go down the Fond du Lac River and then portage at Camsell portage and eventually make our way up to Great Slave lake and the city of Yellowknife. I had told several people about this plan, and now I wished I hadn’t. Lee, my friend, and I, decided to carry our canoe and packs over the shoreline to a new spot along the lake that had open water. We kept hitting patches of ice, and we kept portaging (carrying). We made camp that night and we talked about our adventure. I didn’t want to admit my true feelings of anxiety. We reassured ourselves and each other, that everything would be okay, and then we went to sleep.
The next day, we broke camp and continued paddling and packing. We made very little progress. I had trouble reading the map. We camped. Then we continued, then we camped,.... Finally on about the 9th day, I decided to tell Lee, very reluctantly, about my lack of confidence in myself to complete the trip. I told him I wanted to abort the trip, that I wanted to paddle back to the place where we had been dropped off and call my father for a ride back home (there was a pay phone there at the nearby fishing camp). Lee was ok with my suggestion, and I was grateful for that.
I vowed to change my strategy, and to sort of redouble my efforts, to practice map reading and whitewater canoeing and then to do some challenging trips,.... We paddled and packed back to the starting point. I made the phone call, and a couple days later my dad showed up to pick us up. Many fathers would have been angry at the prospect of being asked to drive all that way, so soon, but my dad was not angry. He didn’t scold me, or give me a hard time; he just helped us load up our stuff and then we began the long journey home. We stopped and fished at a couple rivers on the way, and we even caught some walleye. Louis (that was a nickname I gave him) was happy and I was relieved that he wasn’t “royally pissed” at me. We stayed the night at the cabin at Swearing lake. The next morning, before leaving I shaved my beard, as somehow I didn’t feel I was really worthy of wearing it.
A few days later, Lee departed, by bus, back to Kamloops, British Columbia. I sat in Prince Albert at my Parents’ house and I mostly just thought, all day long. I had read “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau, in the previous months, and it had made a very strong impression on me. I reasoned that maybe because of my life’s philosophy being so unlike that of Henry David Thoreau, that maybe that was why I was so plagued with OCD. So now, I was trying to live a Thoreauvian lifestyle, which meant not working for money, and not being materialistic, at all. I took this very seriously, and I was committed to not getting work unless absolutely necessary, and committed to try to spend my days worry and stress free! I was convinced that the stress that I was feeling, through my anxiety and obsessions and compulsions, was perhaps due to my involvement with commercial activity and living a life of impure or immoral motives. There were several glaring problems with my theory, not the least of which was that I couldn’t stop my thoughts and my constant rumination. I kept thinking about HIV. This brings up a key point about OCD. Nobody with OCD chooses to think about the content of their OCD. It happens on its own as a result of the way the brain is. It is a very difficult thing to accept, that our OCD thoughts run on their own, that we don't have any (or much) control over whether they occur or not. Oftentimes I will think to myself in response to an OC thought, “Why do you keep thinking that?” But it's not me who is actually thinking. It is the mind itself that does thinking, which is actually in a way, simply working memory and mind.
Another friend whom I had met in British Columbia, who was Japanese, was planning to meet me in Yellowknife, NorthWest Territories, that August. I telephoned him and explained to him that he was going to have to fly to Saskatoon instead. Kenichi was his name. A good guy and a good partner on the water. Ken agreed to come to Saskatoon and I told him we would go canoeing and fishing on the Churchill River which was located about 2.5 hours North of Prince Albert. Kenichi did come to Saskatchewan and we did go canoeing. We fished and we paddled (about 400 km) and caught a lot of walleye (a nice fish), but it didn’t matter,... my OCD continued, and just like Sisyphus, I pushed the burdenous boulder up the mountain each day, only to discover it at the bottom again the next morning, or whenever I turned my back on it. It was an “Eternal Recurrence'' and it was a struggle, far beyond my worst nightmares.....