I really do love this subcontinent we call America…

And chilling on my porch.

For ultimately, I’m one of you and you’re one of me.

The world over.

Whether we like it or not.

So…

Good luck, good night, and fuck you very much.

Scotty, Wendy, and Barry.

“Garden of Death” (Hugo Simberg, circa 1896)

The three of them gave me priceless knowledge. All in the space of a few months.

Scotty was found by my colleagues when they were paying him a regular house visit. They smelt that unmistakable smell – the kind you never forget – emanating from his apartment. They immediately called our supervisor, a warhorse in the organization I worked for. She was experienced enough to caution them from going in and instructed them to call emergency services.

I’d worked with Scotty for over a year to get him that damn studio via Toronto Housing. He’d forgotten how long it had been since he got on the waitlist; not surprising considering some folks had been on it upwards of 10 years before being assigned a place. He always said that once he got public housing he would die in his dwelling. I thought, or at least hoped, he meant of old age. Guess he felt like he had lived long enough. He was in there barely a couple of months before deciding to end it all. I wonder if the fact that he was in imminent danger of being kicked out for disturbing the peace had anything to do with it. But I think that was just the catalyst for him exerting that last measure of control over his life.

Went like an impudent child-monarch, the bastard did. Had piled up maybe 15 mattresses to make the most ridiculous bed on earth, needing a step ladder to get on top. Locked his front door and smashed the lock to make it difficult for anyone to come in. Then went on his final bender.

Hunter S. Thompson would have been proud.

I was so goddamn angry. I didn’t go to the funeral. The crotchety fucker and I had bonded as secular atheists long before he went. He was a lot firmer in his rational convictions than I was at the time, which made me philosophically braver too.

Some of the wisest words I’d ever heard came from Scotty:

“We come from the earth and we go back to the earth. It’s pretty much the only fucking truth in life.”

There was no way I was going to that man’s funeral to hear a bunch of people sermonize and shed public tears.

Instead I got piss drunk by my damn self and cussed him out. (“Fuck you Scotty! Stop laughing!!!”)

To be honest, the only reason I was angry was because I was so damn impressed. It took guts to go the way he did.

Just like it took guts for Wendy to have foresight and advocate for herself like a warrior in her final days.

If Scotty helped me get braver in my critical thinking, Wendy taught me beyond any shadow of a doubt that, unless killed by tragic happenstance, we all know when we’re about to die.

Because she knew. Oh boy, did she know. She had her final days prepped like a champ, Wendy did. Knew exactly which palliative organization she wanted to spend her final days in, and checked in three days before dying. For someone who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, complex traumatic disorders, chronic homelessness, and a host of other health issues, it is in retrospective awe that I access my memories of her last few days alive.

Such effortless courage. She went so very peacefully. Wendy had a death that many others with far less traumatic childhoods and lives would well, die, for (zing!).

I did go to her funeral and gave a eulogy speech as per her wishes. I really felt immense gratitude that she went the way she did (something I feel now with Scotty too.)

Both of them went before I could truly say goodbye though. Scotty’s death was very sudden and pretty shocking, though in retrospect was probably quite predictable. Wendy’s was planned and peaceful but over quickly. They both kinda checked in to their final death havens and checked out of the living world relatively quickly.

Barry, on the other hand, departed with me by his side through all of the major last steps.

Chronologically he was actually the first to go among these three firsthand interactions with death during my time in Toronto. But for whatever reason I remember Scotty and Wendy as being the first to really get me thinking about death and dying beyond what I had already seen as a health activist and professional.

With Barry it was different. I saw the actual physical process of dying take place before my eyes as I saw him wither away in a matter of days. It wasn’t tragic though, because I had never seen that angry drunk more at peace. A former Irish Republican Army member who had been knee-capped by the Ulster Volunteer Force as a youth during The Troubles, Barry escaped to Canada where he had anything but a Hollywood story, resulting in the same issues of complex PTSD, substance abuse, chronic homelessness, and health problems that affected almost all of my former clients. I was essentially his only friend towards his final days.

It all started with a phone call, as usual with him screaming at me, drunk out of his mind, about how useless I was as his social worker. Usually I waited out the rant and would jokingly remind him about how I once physically defended him when visiting him at a rough homeless shelter, as he was being attacked by two other guys on account of his big mouth. This would change his anger to laughter and we would then go about our business. This time it was a little different. He wasn’t screaming at me as much as he was screaming in desperate pain. I dropped what I was doing and took the next street car to his dump of a room (the only thing he could afford on his disability allowance, while he waited to get public housing).

The house stank. Barry shared it with two other men having similar problems and who were united in their hatred of Barry. Soon as I entered, the source of the stench was very evident.

Barry screamed at me soon as I entered, “Where the fuck have you been you fucking rughead! I can barely walk and I’ve been pissing in a bucket for two days!”

I didn’t bother reminding him that he could have called for an ambulance service he was entitled to as someone on disability (something I knew I was going to do immediately). I surveyed his room and found a man who had been living on pizza and beer, while indeed pissing in a bucket because it was too painful to walk to the bathroom. I’m glad to say that my job purview did not involve cleaning up the living quarters of clients I worked with.

I got him to a hospital after calling for an ambulance. He screamed at me the entire time, until the EMT had to tell him to calm down so he could do his job of caring for him while they got him to the hospital. That was when Barry finally looked me in the eyes. He must have seen me looking at him in a way that probably indicated I was looking at a dying man. His expression went from one of anger to one of acceptance in a way I can hardly describe with the written word.

I stayed with him in ER until he was admitted. It was weird how grateful and thankful he was. He was never like that. Usually when we got past his angry outbursts, it was jocularity that guided our conversations. This shift in his emotions only confirmed what I felt like both of us knew. Upon admittance, the attending doctor suggested that we run a battery of immediate tests to gauge liver and kidney function. Away from Barry, the doctor suggested that I prepare for a possibly difficult diagnosis the next day,

“…but one can always hope.” he concluded with a gentle, clearly well-practiced, smile.

Sure enough, the next day it was confirmed that Barry had liver cancer and general organ damage so severe that the doctor recommended not even attempting any treatment and skipping to palliative care immediately as it was now a quality of life issue rather than one of preservation. (On a major side note: Canada does palliative healthcare, or really any kind of healthcare, significantly better than America does.)

I have never seen a person more at peace with a terminal diagnosis than Barry at the time. He reunited with his sister (she seemed just as relieved with the prescription of palliation as he was), said goodbye to his remaining relatives and friends, and departed floating in a cocktail of pain-killing drugs to help the body give itself a peaceful end.

I got to say my goodbyes just a few hours before he went. He looked like a zombie but a really, really peaceful one; not one of those stereotypical gnashing kinds. I felt a strange sense of assurance in the knowledge that even the most tragic and traumatized of lives, no matter what, ultimately occur in bodies that innately know how to calm the mind as consciousness extinguishes itself.

It’s a beautiful fucking thing.

Why is misogyny not seen as the greatest threat to humanity?

As the tragedy of yet another mass shooting unfolds, everyone except a few lone voices shouting from their metaphorical rooftops seem to get it.

Everyone knows that a hatred of women connects all of the world’s worst mass shooters. It also connects all of the world’s genocidal maniacs, ethno-fascists, rapists, pedophiles, and religious fundamentalists.

We know this, even if we choose to be willfully ignorant of the facts; We know this just via pure instinct.

All of us, regardless of gender, feel safer around women rather than men. Indeed, often the biggest reason a man exists in most parts of the world is to protect his loved ones from other men. Those of us who are parents feel safer leaving our kids in the hands of women rather than men, unless they’re men we trust (and even then, due to patriarchy and male insecurities, that trust is always at risk of being betrayed with women and children having to bear the brunt of that betrayal). Please don’t bother arguing with me about the tiny minority of females who also betray that trust, they are the very exceptions that prove the norm. And it’s not just a hatred for women, but any kind of feminization of the species.

Now, before butthurt men with fragile egos correct me while their brains froth, I know it’s not all men…but it’s a lot of them. Enough for it to be the biggest fucking problem facing us right now.

I’m not a white knight or feminazi or man-hater for pointing this very obvious poison curdling within humanity for centuries, if not millennia. I am a father to a daughter who lives every day with mind-boggling fear at the myriad ways in which this world can hurt her merely for having been born female.

Oh I know she’s strong, stronger than I’ll ever be and hopefully as strong if not stronger than her glorious warrior mother.

She can deal with anything that life might throw at her.

But she should not have to deal with this level of global hatred for women. No one should.

We have to do better. Otherwise humanity is doomed. Not due to climate change, or pandemics, or predatory capitalism – for they are mere symptoms of the greatest threat humanity has ever faced:

The hatred, envy, and desire to control those who nurture us.

We must eradicate this threat before it eradicates us.

Hindu Atheists, Humanists, and Rationalists need to reclaim Hinduism from Savarna patriarchs…

It is beyond tragic seeing how obscurantist and backward India is rapidly becoming under these Savarna fascist scum of the BJP and their acolytes.

The Brahmin-Kshatriya-Baniya order, borne out of age-old, misogynistic, Manuwadi filth needs to be reduced to a laughing stock and thrown into history’s garbage dump. We need a system borne out of humanism and rationalism. It’s not that complicated. Secular godlessness and gender equality are far and away the two clearest indicators of societal progress and overall wellbeing.

These Hindutva fools are ruining the land and traumatizing society. It’s time to reclaim Hinduism and India from these fascist patriarchs.

We’ve done it before. I’m sure we can do it again.

Why fetishize merely one way to do something…

… especially when diversity is the spice of life.

Watcha think Sus?

xoxo

I need to come out personally and identify publicly as a militantly secular atheist.

We must slay the integrated evil that is religious fundamentalism and misogyny. Within ourselves first and foremost…

A new muscular Hindu nationalism devastates the land of my birth. It is hard to fathom and even harder to see pan out in real time. I feel great guilt and shame in being a member of the Indian diaspora these days. I’m fast beginning to realize how impossible it is to love any entity currently representing this Indian state. It has been for a while if I’m being perfectly honest.

This Hindutva cancer runs deep and is amazingly versatile; currently poisoning the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of insecure Savarna Hindus and their local patriarchs.

I’m trying hard not to allow a strange reverse hatred from poisoning my heart. I hate this new Indian nation-state and I hate this new Hindu nationalism traumatizing my motherland. I hate it just as much as I hate the Islamism, Christian fundamentalism, Zionism, Buddhist nationalism, East Asian fascism, and all other power-mongering, misogynistic social orders around the world traumatizing humanity en masse.

Enough is enough. Long live secularism and humanism. Long live free thought and organic learning. May liberated minds flourish now and forever.

This is one hill I’m fine dying on.

The view is beautiful…