Perdition: Last of the Hernian stories.

The remainder of the first day of recovery was uneventful and I merely completed the morning crossword and went to bed. I began to picture the various elements of my life up to that moment, why had the trajectory of the thing been so erratic, or if not erratic, why so poor? I was feeling sorry for myself in other words, but the pain in my groin was far greater than the anguish that resided in the brain. I tried to fight the urge to take pain-killers with my absurd connection to 19^th century men (or women) who would never have had the opportunity (which was incorrect, they could easily have had tincture of opium or morphine, or brandy) so I lied awake, listening to the snores and smelling the smells of the men around me, the old gentlemen who voided themselves without aid of the bed-pan, of the grunts and murmurs of the afflicted all the way down the hall way. It must have been four in the morning when the night nurse came in with flash-light in hand, and saw me , totally awake and staring into the light of the torch. “Mr. Goodwin, take your pain medication…why are you still awake?!”…I must have been the last one up, so I reluctantly popped the Tylenol 3 into my mouth and eventually the pain became rounded and I awoke two hours later drenched in sweat. The bed was soaked and I needed to get up. It was the 17^th, Friday, and I was slightly over 24 hours to departure. I was exhausted, but, for whatever reason, I felt better, was a fever broken? I am unsure, but I eventually made my way to breakfast. The Middling Banker and his associates were, of course, not present, they would have been involved in the repair process, and the tell-tale sounds of the wheel chairs and the shuffling began in earnest, coupled with the ringing for the nurse station from pained and delirious post-op patients. I decide to read the papers that arrive in the lounge, only the Star and the Sun…the opposites of the social/political capital spectrum and equally inferior, a mirror to the polarization of Canada and the West in general. The insanity was picking up in pace and the shufflers reflected the trend. That evening, after the “Last Supper” as the ‘old guard’ called it, in bemusement, I spoke with a couple of gentlemen from old farming stock. One was a veteran of the IT field, and worked initially in the public sector for the Ontario power agency and was outsourced to a third party in order to make things ‘as efficient as possible’, meaning, of course, to take the governments largesse and squeeze every dollar out of it for their own pockets while leaving the public’s power supplies compromised and increasingly expensive. The other hardscrabble gent had his own farm and was a conservative in manner but was not impressed with the Governmental intrusions regarding cyber spying, (The Toews Statement: “You’re either with us or with the Child Rapists”) the bill was being debated in Question Period at the time. The IT guy piped up as well. Both gentlemen had strong jaws, large farming hands, plain spoken pragmatic sentiments with the Canadian traditional prudence of not going beyond budget, of doing right by all with adroitness and honesty, these men, such as myself, were adrift in the cynicism and winner take all mentality of the 21^st Century. The IT man, back to the conversation, agreed with the farmer and stated that the slow crawl to fascism was upon us. Let me be very specific, these were not wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, these were not men who lived in the basement of a parent, feasting on pizza-pockets and taking breaks between hysterical V-Masked blogging for shameful acts of self-abuse. No, these men were (are) both great contributors to society, one aided in keeping Power plants secure, the other raises cash-crops for the benefit of all. When hard faced, and strong minded practical men, who otherwise would have absolutely no time whatsoever for so called ‘flights of fancy’ regarding government intrusions, when these men begin to state that “Fascism”, and that is a direct quote, is ‘creeping into this country, and quickly’, you know that there is a problem. All of one’s internal inferences, that at one time seemed paranoid and seemingly dismissible, began to dawn on a horrible reality: the frenzy may be a real reaction, the dancing panic behind the solidity of rationalizations might actually hold weight, it might actually be happening. They continued along, but nervousness pervaded the conversation, the rest of the floor had gone to bed. As a natural insomniac, I remained awake in the lounge too, there was no more talk of Hockey, or ‘The wife’, or the basic and subtle complaints regarding the surgery. No, in the darkness and the faint glow of the 24 hour ‘news’ channel (‘We’ve Got You Covered’…indeed), a low ebb was manifested, among the hold-overs from the 1970s, not just the architecture or the faded game-boards, but in the minds of the men talking, was a strange and prohibitive hope at a synthesis of society, for a little while, until they took it for granted, until ‘market forces’ and ‘supply side’ economics came to the fore, until they equated pensions with investment, until the surfaces gleaned with gloss over the rough hewn backgrounds of decay and concentration, until the rulers disappeared, until the madness became the ‘new normal;, until Robo-Calls blanketed the rights of voters, until the elderly, the young, the weak, the ignorant, the vain, the impressionable, the voluble, were told to vote against their proper standings, until it all became about ‘wedges’ and ‘identity politics’ to mask the reality that inexhaustible labour met exhaustible resources in the end game of the Western Experience, until the children of the children of the Greatest Generation, unless they are radiated horrors, woke up and could not believe the past, could not believe the present, and could have no handle on the future, beyond the clicks and groans of the glowing screen, the magnet that would remain in the face of the absolute darkness everywhere else. We sat there, and fell silent (“What Can We Do?” I imagine ran through their thoughts, in a plaintive, if not impotent way)…I said, “Well gentlemen, I am off, I had better sleep.” And so it was, I languished in bed as once again, the Roommate was set to vibrate, and I thought once again, with self-pity, about the trajectory of my life. I felt absolutely without content, with all of my metal clips removed, my pain medication untouched, and this night it was not to be consumed. I stared at the ceiling, I thought of 1998, I thought of the Fleetwood Mac song that reminded me of a time that I thought only of the future being complete, with strong opinion, with unvarnished confidence, when it was to be Law and Politics, when it was to be me and a family at the top of Summit Circle, with the law firm at the top of the IBM building in Montreal. Then the inevitable Blue Drape fell over my reveries and I was again in the smallish hospital bed, the dawn coming through another sleepless nightime.

Saturday the 18^th was my day to leave, I was entering my third day without bathing, I was dishevelled, but I managed to shave with the electric razor and tried to wash, in vain, my face. Constipation was almost total, Oat bran was trying to affect changes but without great success. I was a wreck, as it were, and packed up, slowly, my belongings and effects, and shuffled down to the last breakfast. Ah ha, the gleaning faces of two nights ago had now joined the Ghost-Dancers, the middling-banker was slovenly staring into his oatmeal, he briefly looked at me with eyes of Pain and faint anger, “You damn liar!” his face told me, and I smiled inside myself, I tried to be more honest than the emissary I spoke to four days earlier, but I guess it all comes out the same. What difference would it make, to say anything else to the contrary, when the mechanism cannot be stopped and the momentum has no braking tool except total immolation? I sat down, and ate eggs and bacon, I said nothing and this time ensured that I was alone…many of my cycle-men had already gone home and I was one of the last. I began to walk as much as possible, circling from floor to floor in a blank state, I would be glad to return home, to see my wife and daughter, to resume stewing in self-imposed exile, in regret and failure. I waited outside for the final half-hour for my wife to pick me up in the silver Japanese sedan as rank and Western despair riled up inside. She came, and I gave her a perfunctory hug and kissed my daughter sitting in her safety seat in the back, her beautiful blue eyes flashing unconditional love into mine. I opened the front door and sat, silent, as questions first began to flood from my wife beside me, to which I gave short replies. The anger, the rage, the emptiness was mounting. I did not want to be driving back to Guelph, my life was careening into nothingness, it was cars and the 407 and the 401, trucks, wheels, slush, snow, what was I returning to? The Mat of hate was falling onto my brain, as if nothing had changed since the previous fall, the disappointment with programs, the drinking that became a life-raft filled with lead, what was the point of the exercise then? Or the repair? To come out the other end with the same bloodied rage and cursory nascent hate that revolved in my head. We arrived and I sat, slowly, into the Lazy-Boy, I wanted to drink immediately, but none was available, I wanted to be alone, but I could not move to avoid the gossip that inevitably comes with days being absent from ‘home’. What really changed? The resentment still persisted to this adopted city, to another failed decade seemingly at its beginning, to a downward political cycle of the Western World reaching its fevered apex prior to being torn apart, cosmically, by profligacy, decadence, stupidity, the rise of more mendacious eastern customers, the rise of preposterous and asinine theocracy at home and abroad when going to college was considered an act of “snobbery” (according to Santorum), to the thought of aspiring to greatness as being sin, when the true masters of mankind increased their unimaginable wealth while simultaneously disappearing from view. I had enough, I was sitting in front of the computer two nights later, it was 12:30 at night, I had three drinks in me and I was beginning to repeat. I thought of blue eyes, of being 31, of seeing mediocrity crashing in all around me, of ten years of talking and talking and drinking, and talking, and not sleeping, of not writing, of not laughing enough, of stupid reminisces that go nowhere, and finally once again to the conversation with the two men on Friday night, at the fear and panic that danced around in our brains, that the Western world, and Canada specifically, was not the glowing sceptre it was, that the cyclotron was spinning too fast, that the hospitals were closing, the schools were not teaching, the parents were not raising, the synthesis of society was not there, too much disparity, too much shouting and frothy mouthed sociopathy emanating from leaders, from people who could not deal with civility, so engrossed in themselves that they feared ten seconds away from self-aggrandizement through their i-pids, their phones, their social networking, their ‘healing’ classes, their ‘play-dates’, their false community front that masked Narcissism and Fear and Emptiness and Black impulses in a World, a model, built on nothing, built on debt, built on lie, built on guile, built on Hate…ground into dust, into the Process of the Market. I needed to write, so the talking had to cease, and so to I had, in spite of it all, retreat while expanding, into my own glowing screen.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia - Part Nine

Lunch time. Today it was to be pulled pork on garlic bread (or garlic toast as they call it these days) and now I was part of the ‘Shuffler’ post-op veteran group. At the table, I was alone, for a short while, until a chipper 40 something banker, who probably went to Western for economics and then to a local branch, until the majestic MBA was earned from Queen’s, and then he worked on the 28^th floor (out of 60) in the Red tower on Bay. He was on his way, as it were. He was earnest, tall, with long fingers, but he had a profound dullness in his smallish grey eyes that told me on the 28^th floor he would remain. Tactically competent, amiable, but ultimately without guile and ingenuity, he would remain pliable in the machinations of the wolves on the 32 floors above. The Top Floors: Where problems were solved, where the counsels and the investors and the preferred stock-changers and the moneyed descendants of the family compact sat in the drammed infused warm edifice that looked out into the beige-soot smeary smog horizon over Lake Ontario. The Top Floors: Where the sky remained a horizontal abode for those who rarely, if ever, had to look down, and surely never had to look up. But the Oakville banker was unaware of all of this; he merely wanted to ask me about the ‘procedure’.

“Well”, I began, “its OK, they drug you, they bring you downstairs, you lie down for a while, then they fix your hernia … it should take less than three hours in total.” …

“They said only about 45 minutes.” He replied.

“You mean the actually surgery, I meant the whole routine, you know, waiting, drugging, fixing, stitching and wheeling takes three hours.” I tried to explain.

“Ok, huh, so three hours and then you are up?”

 I realised I had made a mistake for changing the accepted parameters of discussing the time frame for someone who lacked a certain touch of mental elasticity, a trait common in everyone who want to conform the world to their narrow minded set piece vision, rather than understand the world for what it is: an impossibility that we must adjust to. So instead of interjecting that actually one must add four hours of lying down to the three hour actual operation procedure, I simply replied: “Yes, just the three hours.” He was somewhat mollified but I could sense that he was repressing anxiety under that visage of a man who wanted to be back in Oakville with the sales-guy neighbour, with ribs and beer.  I wanted to be in Guelph, with the sales-guy neighbour, with ribs and beer, but through the haze I knew it would be another 48 hours until my first taste of salted pork and the gallons of hops that followed. We continued, or he mainly, continued the conversation about how one got one’s hernia. He exclaimed he saw a young guy do a ‘lift and jerk’ weight lift and wanted, in a pique of middle-aged anxiety, to emulate the motion. He managed only to place a weight on one side of the bar, and as he tried to pick up the cylindrical weight for the other he felt a terrible tear on his right side and wham! He was brought back to the fact that he was 45 and not on Daytona Beach back in that glorious February of ’89, with Poison blaring in the background and gyrating in front of that good lucking, if somewhat slutty American girl from Akron in the High Hip bikini bottom and the midriff exposed “Ferris Bueller” promo-t-shirt…with Budweiser in hand (or was it Coors light? Jeez, such a long time ago)…and then the horrific realisation came to him that his 14 year old daughter was sexting during spare and perhaps was not actually going to Hot Yoga at night, but somewhere far more nefarious, something he caught a glimpse of through the light blue glow of the device his daughter clanged on incessantly: “meet me with the others at night-stream… we have all the snappies… the Blazer with the whippets are go…u down for it Madison?” or some approximation of the illiterate nonsense that the jacked-up, brainless, sociopathic and narcissistic little punks use throughout their insipid young lives as their parents rogue ahead, so self-involved that they don’t notice the pimples that are not pimples, they don’t notice the empty gaze, they don’t notice that they don’t notice that their kids don’t notice that their teacher’s don’t notice the world collapsing all around us. Lunch was over, and I got up and said “Good Luck” (as if he or I have any input regarding the outcome of the surgery) to the Middling Banker, and I passed the glowing screens of the one’s who will ‘work through’ their stay at the Hospital in the Lounge and up, slowly, painfully, the stairs to the third floor lounge.

            I went back to my room as it was now the time for the first set of metal clips to removed from our wound. I had not yet looked at the gash on my right side for it was too painful to lift, or drop, any part of body without reason to. But, a very large (Height, structure, not Fat), and very good looking nurse, who’s descendants I would argue came from the Gold Coast of Africa implored me to “Drop it like its hot” and I gladly obliged. Upon first looking at my wound I was actually bemused, it was ugly, it was Ugly, and on the ridge were the clips (12 of them) of which 6 were to be removed by the obliging Doctor who was to come soon.

“So, this is fine?” I said to the nurse.

“Oh yeah, no big deal, you are coming along well Mr. Goodwin”.

Then, Doctor so and so came in and removed half of the metal clips and immediately I felt better and the tearing sensation that accompanied every movement began to abate. Lying in my increasingly sanguine mindset, I heard a small commotion, merely a disagreement over procedure, emanating from the room across the hall. A young chap from Alliston was telling his surgeon that: “Hey, this cut is going pretty close to my ‘area’, you know what I mean, what the hell is this??” ..  to which, the surgeon, with a great Indian accent coupled with the dismissive verbal delivery that only a snobbish MD can deliver, replied: “Well, obviously the hernia was slightly larger than you claimed, therefore we made the appropriate adjustments and had to cleave the incisions longer than the length initially scaled, it is of no real concern”.

“Oh really?” came back the young man, “it’s gonna be a concern when I can’t get it up, or can’t have any kids, how do I know that it isn’t [messed] up?”

 “Please sir, we have made all the correct accommodations for your procedure, you will be healed and will continue with your very normal life”

 “What is that supposed to mean…ouch, watch out with those clips eh?”

 At this point, I was trying not to laugh, the interaction was amusing but laughter was an unacceptable outlet because the pain was too great…but at this point, the unthinkable happened, to manoeuvre the discussion beyond simple disagreement over bed-side manner into the realm of absurd hilarity. The poor chap from Alliston sneezed in the midst of his complaints and semi-valid concerns. The scream that followed the sneeze would fit nicely on a scratchy old Halloween sound effect 45, then, as if it was meant to happen, the young bogan punched the wall. I had tears of laughter and lunacy running down my gaunt and black-ridged face and eyes. I heard the doctor leave as the nurse from Cote D’Ivoire soothed the poor Alliston boy across the way. “Fking C—ks—cker!!” was the last missive I heard from him.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia - Part Eight

At 6:00 AM on the 16^th began my first (of two) remaining days in the hernia repair centre and therefore was my first day of ‘Recovery’. An older Jamaican nurse came into the room and said “Rise and Shine Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Roommate, time for your pain medication”, which was, I believe, extra-strength generic Tylenol. We were then told that we were expected at Breakfast that morning. Back downstairs, but now I was not a New Guy, gone was the jaunty quick step, gone was the impatience and annoyance of the ‘smell’ of the lounge. Gone, was the self-confidence of rebellion against the mavens of the hospital, gone was any self-assurance, self-reliance. I was broken like a circus animal. I was now a Shuffler myself: a farty degenerate crank on medication, moving slower than Evolution, thinking about nothing except the next meal time or the prune juice between them. Black lines began to surface under my eyes, I did not understand time or sleep, I would not engage in conversation with others unless prompted. I would acquiesce to every whim and demand from staff and nurse. I was cheerful at the slightest suggestion or activity.

The largest case in point was the “Exercise Routine” at 11:30. If one needed the ne plus ultra example of the nagging suspicion that one was perhaps not in the sanest environment devised, this was it. The PA rang out with a message from the saccharine voiced nurse: “Come, all those who have had surgery, to the second floor lounge for exercise.” Great, I thought, will do, yes, time to walk there. Upon feeling out the best place to manoeuvre I gazed upon our “fitness instructor”. She was a nurse in her late sixties and was to ‘fitness’ what a pedophile would be to ‘early child development.’ She put on Elvis and began to move in ways that were obviously coming from the top of her head. She jerked and manovered in ways Margie Gillis could only dream of. Randomly, she seemed to think, “OK, better move some other way”…she put her arms outstretched and began to rotate and then, OK, now she laterally moved her arms, now she bent over, but, no, oh wait, now she was twisting to and fro…I imagine this actually put back my healing timeframe by three weeks, but in my Tylenol 3 stupor (I also suspect the food was sprinkled with sedatives) I was on the verge of hysterical laughter and popped and twisted with the ‘nurse’ when all of a sudden, the most absurd thing I have ever took part in (and I was at a ‘Pots and Pans’ themed music party in University, and a ‘Dog’ themed university party where two Labradors did battle in a one bedroom apartment with 15 other people): The fitness instructor cued up the theme song from the “Bridge over the river kwai.” The song is a marshal ditty with whistling and drums and fife, and all the stuff that one associates with 1960s war movies set in the Pacific theatre of World War Two. She then extolled us to, and I quote: “Kick up your heels and clap your hands above your head! Yeah! Let’s march around the second floor lounge, keep it up and push yourself!” Thus began the parade of ludicrous madness. I was second in line from an older effeminate Japanese man who really seemed to channel George Takei while marching. He was, as it were, “in the moment.” The gentlemen was kicking his legs, tilting his head like a dancer in a Bolly-wood four hour long monstrosity while laying on the mustard thick with his fleshy hand clapping. I was trying not to laugh as I could feel my abdominal muscles searing painfully in my brain…so I focused on the sights and my movements…”To hell with it,” I thought, “I can march with the best of them.” I tried to goose step and with mixed results, the mixed results being I almost kicked the man in front in the head while at the same time doubling over in shocking idiocy induced pain. The long snaking rubric of madness continued unabated behind the pied piper and now I could see the rest of the line behind me. Grimacing zamboni drivers who were supplementing their old-age security cheques who got a hernia from clearing some ice from the boards were trying to lift their legs in a futile attempt to ‘exercise’, or the bookish civil servant who was trying his best to ape the movements of the nurse, thinking that one must follow “Correct Procedure” without realizing this whole production was based on whim and craziness and had nothing to do with Work Place Safety, or C-456 Forms, or Measured Improvements, or Benchmarks, or Year to Date progress, or Statistics or Stability or Upward Mobility. No, this was relentless nonsense, as his forms and figures were, in the end, also nonsense. I knew all at once that if someone drove up the plush wooded estate and entered the white washed wooden edifice of the hospital and knew nothing about a Hernia Centre and merely watched the nurses interacting with the patients via the PA system about meals or exercise, about seeing shuffling zombie-like patients with empty grey-black eyes, about catatonic like husks of men watching hour after empty, insipid hour of Sports on the HD TV, of seeing this absolutely preposterous spectacle of men and one woman marching to the Bridge over the River Quay or Kwai one would come to an immediate and implacable conclusion: this is a proper Nuthouse. This would have been correctly perceived as a hold-over from the good old days of the proper welfare state era of the just society, when crazies and people who needed a good shot in the arm (as it were) would be fed, housed, and corrected in an edifice catered to the purpose. Would not have this been better than drop in centres and half-subsidized medication depots where homeless men and women thinking that Jesus talked to them through the microwave in the Junior ‘B’ hockey arena visitor lounge could get their Schizophrenia pills? I am not sure, the experience at the Hernia repair Centre has complicated the debate and I was becoming increasingly confused in my politics of care as the days rolled on under watch of staff, camera, stupor and self-regulation (the last was a fleeting notion as I retreated into self-oblivion). The music stopped and sure enough, it was lunch time, the nurse disappeared, the radio was put away, and I was shuffling, empty eyed and empty brained, down into the lunch-room, as I noticed a thirty-something man, well dressed, collared shirt, khakis, as he bound up the stairs almost knocking me over…”Bloody New Guy”, I muttered.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia. Part Seven

The rest of the 15^th was awash in strange and unfocused activity. I remember distinctly disobeying the ‘four hour’ lie down rule, or at least trying to, by telling myself that the hockey game must be watched. I Must represent minority hockey rights (read: not be a Leafs fan) in the TV chamber. I tried to move, a burning pain shot throughout my entire body, a purposeful tearing sensation screeched in my groin…”oh boy, well, I am half way there”…meaning, I was half way to sitting up on the bed, let alone any standing on my own accord or any success in shuffling to the toilet. Sitting on the edge of the bed became a problem immediately…waves, waves of nausea not unlike those created by the eruption of Krakatoa were sent upwards and reverse peristaltic reactions began in earnest…”back down, back down, back down, ok” and I went back to the opiate induced stupor.

Throughout the initial aborted attempt at movement, and all subsequent aborted attempts at movement during those tenuous hours on the 15^th, I could hear braying chatter emanating from the left side of the bed-chamber. My procedure ended at around 3:00 in the afternoon and therefore right in the middle of the first round of visiting hours (2:00 – 4:00). I knew this would present an interesting situation as I was already familiar with the parents of Roommate. He was, as mentioned, a chap of 19 (born in 1992) and therefore still in the bosom of the 21^st century of the Cradle to Grave Hellaparent. He intimated to me that his mother was texting incessantly regarding absolutely everything and anything related to surgery, a hospital, walking, eating, personal hygiene, breathing, moving one’s eyeballs, existing, you name it. They were in the room when I arrived, the parents I mean, and they were really en place, as it were. Roommate was well solidified by Mommy’s insistence that the clothes were well placed in the closet, that the entire table was well engrossed with the personal effects of Roommate. Forget three days in a hernia hospital, this chap was outfitted for a ninety day slog with Wolseley to put down that irascible Riel across the Great North West. You would think he had ten sherpas popping out of his bag with steaming Ceylon tea and a birch bark canoe to paddle down into the OR. Only ten years ago, a boy of 19 would be perspiring with embarrassment at the intrusion, yes, intrusion of mommy and daddy in preparation for surgery. I would probably have received one phone call from my mom…she loves me, on that score I am certain, and I her, but never would she have been so involved with a 72 hour sojourn into the Herniated unknown. But, I imagine in this age of festering narcissism, it never occurred to parents and child that anything was out of the ordinary. I could see a nurse eyeing all of this and muttering to herself: “uh-huh, white boy problems”. Or maybe I am just bitter, maybe I was bitter because no-one called me, no one visited, I am not sure people even knew I was in the hospital. Or, maybe because of years of self-imposed exile and a well-known streak of high-minded misanthropy, coupled with a Total and Unrelenting Hatred of personal communication devices, I could not communicate with anyone, nor really wanted to. I mean, really, what could I articulate in a fog of opiates that could not be inferred by anyone realizing that I came out of surgery only an hour ago. What really would be on the docket of conversation? Let’s see, down to brass tacks over the euro-debt problem, or that latent homosexual optometrist in Syria, how do we deal with such an effeminate tyrant? Or, oh wait, I can’t even sit up!

Which brings me back to the original observation . . . even roommate was now getting annoyed at the shrill-hee hawing of Mommy in the room. After Roommate’s second Tylenol-3..he stated: “Well, I can’t really stay awake here, why don’t you guys head back to the hotel?”…Indeed, I thought to myself, please get out! I was not acknowledged, not really, and this was amusing to me, all I could think of at this point was, aha, yes, I can eat in peace once the nurses come. Come the night. I was in pain, yes, and I was nauseous, yes, but the last thing a man wants to hear is hard-edged bitching from anyone, and luckily, all of that manner of audible tyranny was put to rest as Roommate drifted into a fitful sleep. At this point, the meal cart came in and I enjoyed two sandwiches (Roommate could not keep anything down), a mug of coffee, the best cookie I have eaten up to this point (or so I thought, this was the first proper ‘unhealthy’ desert I had eaten in 50 days, and I was fairly high on the opiates) and raspberry Jello. By this point I thought to myself, “well, it must be around 7:00 PM and I must make my way to the TV lounge”. The time was actually now two in the morning and I realized that I was therefore not apparently conscious after that final bliss inducing swallow of Jello, the room was black, and there was no food tray. At this point, my bladder was explaining to my brain that after such a long relationship with coffee and litres of IV fluid, that it was time to withdraw all funds and close the account. So, it was up and at them time again, and I could barely shuffle into the bathroom…Discomfort was at fever pitch, I was completely nauseous, as one feels after an eight hour Scotch drunk, only to wake up half-drunk, with the room spinning, but also with the urge to pee…so, in this state, I had to sit on the toilet. I have never done this before, and felt Donald Smith look down on me, with those Granite Eye-Brows furrowed and dire, his mouth, hidden behind that mighty beard, pursed in a droop and his Blue-Steel Celtic eyes looking at me with shame and disdain..Yes, I felt ashamed, to pee sitting down for me was a nadir of sorts, a surrender to the mad-house, with the red-heat lamp seemingly filming the whole ordeal and bathing me in rusty embarrassment. After what seemed like three hours (and it may well have been this long) I used the hand rail (!) to stand. I pulled my smock pants up, with the effort usually required to design the CERN cyclotron, and tried not to vomit on the lengthy 4 foot trip back to bed.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia Part 6

As the doors opened to the pre-op room I knew immediately that all manner of deceit and lies were rained down upon us, the unsuspecting patients, to bring us down into the feeding pen, err, pre-op room. To lure us into this false-halcyon Hernia Hospital that was really a den of horror and impropriety, a bloody and turgid riposte of all things good, clear, and serene. The room was at best emanating the light worst associated with twilight, the kind of twilight darkness that looms in late November like the scythe of the reaper…the twilight that forces families to can and pickle, to batter down the hatches and prepare for two to three Canadian months of drunken, darkened depression. The effect of the darkened room was, I would imagine, supposed to elicit a reaction of serenity and calmness in the patient as they were led to their bed. But in me, nothing but jarring uneasiness crept into my brain, something was off-kilter and strange.

The room itself was long and disorienting. There were approximately ten beds on either side of the long hall and each was occupied by men (no women today) in varying degrees of semi-consciousness. The room reminded me of black and white photos from the field hospitals of the Great War. Tidy nurses with harrowed looks in their eyes, soldiers in remiss, pained yet trying to remain stoic with the knowledge that they were convalescing in one of the greatest gaping maws of horror that the world has ever known. I was led by my new nurse, and was laid into bed. So far I was still quite interested by the sights and sounds of the hall and once I was horizontal I looked up into a greasy looking light with thick glass (consummate with the look of a 1960s era hospital) that was auburn grain coloured such as the early dusk sun over the Huron. I looked left and saw the wicked reality, the end game of my raison d’être for being in the Hernia Repair Centre…I saw the operating theatres.

There were five in the hospital but I could only see three, all were a bee-hive of activity with groaning and insensible patients being walked in or wheeled out by rushing aides and nurses, by the moderated staccato commands of the physicians and surgeons….I looked right and saw a patient being led back into bed and the curtain being enclosed around him….”Tell the nurse to keep those metal clamps on the wound for the full duration…how is the pulse rate? Yes, he is stable, but I want him here for observation for at least an hour” said the surgeon to the obliging staff/nurse. The patient moans and I can tell he is fighting the confinement, he sounds like an octogenarian who got more than he bargained for. I thought of my late Papa (my father’s father) and reckoned he was comparable in age to this sorry fellow at the time of his hernia repair and shuddered, not a great thing to go through at any age, but at an age when you have built your whole life and saw the fruits of the labour in the progress of your children’s and children’s children’s lives…of the munificent example you set for all to follow, of the caring and loving wife that you have been married to for sixty years. Only to be reduced to a hacked-open and half sensible hernia patient being harried to and fro by insensitive staff obsessed with the margin, the bottom line, and efficiency. But that is life, and the great wheel cares nothing for the personal experiences of men and women, especially as the cruel task master prepares to extinguish their presence forever. My Papa did survive the surgery, but it was emblematic of the decline, the decline we perceive in our culture, a decline that usually is merely a projection of the knowledge that it is Personal Decline that is the final distributor of oblivion. He was a Catholic, and I miss him dearly, I try to suspend disbelief in a God for the benefit of my sanity, but that practice always fails. It failed in Mass when I was a child, I could never understand forever, the concept, the fact that it was expediently explained by a priest who could not know any more of its heavenly certainty than I, a child of six. I could never understand the purpose of death as a precursor for life eternal, the concept made and makes no sense at all. Why would we not simply be born into forever? Ah, these are troubling thoughts, thoughts that never get easier to remedy, not anyway, with the simple theological maxims of so-called experts or snake-oiled simpletons screeching from auditoriums filled to overflowing with the desperate and the over-extended, the helpless and the hopeless, the ones to whom the snakers revile yet fleece in a demonic orgy of self-congratulation and sublimeless and vulgar approximations of “Do what I am Saying, and Buy what I am Selling or Die Forever in Hell and Pain”. I am not sure what happens, I am not sure at all about many things, and my life’s trajectory reflects this stance.

I thought of all of these things as a nurse broke the spell by giving me three Ativans. I believe Ativan is a sleeping-pill although I am not sure. The drug, in a very insidious fashion, create a false aura of lucidity while in reality destroying all sense and sensibility from being emanated from my lips. The auburn light began to become increasingly glassy, the harrowing twilight began to become rounded and soft, my thoughts began to erode, not dissimilar to the fog of gin prior to the acceptable cocktail hour of five PM. Or when you are expected to attend a night lecture on the Peruvian Liberal experiment of the mid-1980s and in reality you can scarcely walk to the mail-box. When you began to drink beer prior to the concert at ten in the morning when suddenly you realize your grandmother is arriving to supper later and you stare at the frying pan uncertain how, what, and when, to fry and what to accompany in the form of starch or carbohydrate to ensure the polite progressions of conversation to feast, to tea and coffee afterwards. A strange and comfortable stupor in otherwords, that complements a knowledge that something terrible, uncomfortable, and painful is about to happen and you have prepared for it solely by destroying your wits. Or, in this case, having them destroyed by someone else . . .

Eventually, I had the brave idea of emptying my bladder prior to surgery, this was accomplished right after a large and powerful dose of Demerol was administered, via Massive Syringe into my buttocks. “Oh yes, I thought, this will help for surgery…I would hate to have to urinate during the facile repair!”…well I mentioned this to an aide and proceeded to get up…As I began to rise, the line from Todd Rundgren’s song, And all the children sing came to mind immediately: “Ain’t gravity a funny thing?” The ship began to sway back and forth, it was Southern Comfort in Grade 11 all over again. I was legless, the nurse came quickly to usher me into the scarlet lit bathroom and I had a railing to support me as I tried, with the power of concentration that I would imagine Oppenheimer had when the first Atom Bomb detonated or was being developed, to urinate accurately into the toilet, with less success than on the Nevada plains wrought by Scientists of War. After being led to bed, I began further to slip into a knowledge that I was absolutely out of it. But in my mind, the synapses seemed to be sending lucid signals to each other.

Then the Doctor came and I knew then that it was my turn on the table. He was on my left holding one arm up while the anathesiologist (or Nurse Practitioner?) named Anna helped me into a very large and Very bright (or so it seemed) room and I saw the green table, on which I would lay. I began to shiver, very very uncontrollably. Anna (who had the old style Soviet “Chef” cap that their doctors and nurses so proudly wore, I still prefer its stylizations to ours) put a warm blanket on top of me. I immediately thought myself as a basket of rolls being covered by warm cloth prior to being sliced open and buttered, only to be dipped in soup, or stew, or chicken sauce. Then, what at the time seemed like a gremlin, but in fact was probably an aged retired doctor (they called the gremlin doctor ‘so and so’) began to rudely slam an iv drip into my right hand, along with Anna putting on the obligatory index finger pulse monitor. I was on the verge of unconsciousness but was held at bay either by the design of the medication (probable) or by sheer tyranny of will (less probable). Anna began to stroke my head as she said, “Everything will be fine, just relax, why are you shivering?” and another nurse began to hold down my left arm, which maybe was beginning to act restlessly and on its own esteem as the doctor cut in. Well, so far so good I thought as I stared into the large operating lights above the green clothed screen that separated my line of sight with the hernia operation that was taking place. All of a sudden the darkest, the strangest, the most uncomfortable and dirtiest pain I have ever felt was beamed and blasted from deep in my bowels to the pain center in my brain. I pictured Mel Gibson being defenestrated in the ridiculous closing scene of Brave Heart. The pain was absolutely indescribable, things were being manipulated deep in my body, visions of Schwartz’s delicatessen whirled in my mind’s eye…I was the Brisket! How dare the Hernia Hospital ruin my visions and smells and sights of perfection that is a Montreal Smoked Meat Sandwich….and soon my brain was telling my mouth: “ANASTHETIC..MORE MORE MORE MORE..PAIN PAIN PAIN…FIRE BLOOD RAZORS RAZORS RAZORS”….soon my brain told my feet to shoot up in a jagged and uncoordinated movement…soon my mouth did try to speak..and the sounds that came out was: “CROOBLE…CRAN CORAN BLABBB..IMMURGANTRY...Flabble! Flannnn..jerbal…grunnnnnnnnnn”…the surgeons reply…not to me personally of course, was “Ok nurse, please administer more anaesthetic.” Oh yes, as simple as that. Soon the room was Grey…I felt molestation in my abdomen, but now it seemed a faint and benign game of ‘Operation” was being performed with robotic dispassion on my right groin. I was in and out of the picture, the dirty and gritty gray mind-dull encompassed me completely. I could barely hear the radio play in the background and yet could feel the soothing caress of Anna on my head and the side nurse holding down my appendages in order to avoid the surgeon’s hand slipping with scalpel slicing some artery into shreds.

Eventually, after what seemed like ten eons of geo-graphical time rolling out consecutively I began to feel myself, and my right groin specifically, to be sewn shut. It was like a shoe being tied on my body and the Angelic Nurse of the Post-Op (same as pre-op) told me to get up off the operating table. I was completely out of my mind by this point and robotically hopped, yes hopped, to the chagrin of the doctor and Anna, onto the floor and narrowly fell into the wheel chair back to my room. I saw orange Hunt’s Spaghetti sauce like splatter on the floor and on the table…was that me? I thought, was that the disinfectant….but more pressing was the knowledge that I could not hold myself up…the knowledge that I felt as cold as a old Innu matron floating to oblivion, naked, on an ice flow…all of this as I was placed inside the ‘seat-belt’ of the wheel chair and was trying to make small talk (A skill I am utterly lousy at in ordinary situations that now was an impossible feat). While being rolled up stairs…”Thuurrrsss a game on tanaight….habs and Brains…I mean, Bruins…I need ta watch thisssss thingggggg…I don’t need four hours on my back?! Foaaaget it!”…”Oh really?” said the nurse with humourous incredulity and soon I was in bed…filled to the brim with opiates and witnessing Roommate in a similar state with his parents. The operation was over but the Madhouse was coming into its final stage of fruition. My first though lying back in bed was…”That lying Polish MMA Bastard!”

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia. Part Five

Roommate was already asleep as I walked into the double occupancy room that we shared. I was exceptionally lucid and calm, the latter not being a character trait that I am associated with. I undressed, turned out the light and began to think of how relaxed I was about surgery. “Piece of Cake” I murmured to myself as I heard the roommate’s phone vibrate and whirr, probably a late good luck message from his girlfriend. I turned my thoughts to what the Polish MMA chap said at dinner and was again confident about tomorrow’s event. “What would Donald Alexander Smith think?” I asked myself. He would consider the surgery a minor triviality in a lifetime of hard-work, fighting adversity and acquisition through skill and fairness…to die with Stainless Integrity.

Lord Strathcona, after Smith was given a baroncy, is the closest approximation to the Canadian male archetype. He and Pierre Berton are personal heroes of mine. They represent, in my opinion, a disappearing breed of Sangfroid Optimism and Resilience. Smith was a Scot who immigrated to Canada in the mid 19^th century and worked for 25 years in the Labradorean outback where he rose to the top of the HBC. Not only that, he saved all of his pennies and slowly built up majority stock control of the company and with his growing wealth, also managed to finance the building of the CPR. Indeed he drove into the ground the Last Spike (on his second try, he was a Klutz). His intense blue eyes, staring out from eye-brows that could easily anchor two tug-boats, were something to behold. The stare of profound intelligence with a hardened but not unfriendly look of determination…Craichallachie indeed!

Pierre Berton, my Canadian hero of the 20^th century, was also a determined and resilient optimist. He wrote incessantly about the same men and women I admire who built this country from a windswept, rocky, and intimidating claw, into a windswept, rocky, and intimidating community of divergent interests, complex opinion and passions of many kinds. A tapestry of culture that superseded the nascent British antecedent into a profound and truly Canadian continent that only recently has begun to erode by the intellectual truncheon of reaction and pure ‘market forces.’ Market forces that do not echo a grand vision of capitalists as Smith, or of CCF hard working writers as Berton, who both knew personal responsibility was a hand maiden of communal success and not merely a tool for personal, mammon inculcated greed and avarice in the “’ME ME ME’” and everyone else can eat CROW” mentality of the new Libertarian. . . .

All of these thoughts were swirling in my head until the lights came on in an abrupt flash of supreme efficiency. Indeed, the Shaving Lady had come to wake us up. The Shaving Lady was, I believe, a recent immigrant from the Philippines who was friendly and perfunctory. It was 6:00 AM and I was awoken by the neon light above my head (behind the bed on the wall) and the inevitable brilliant supernova that explodes in the retina and the neurons being blasted by the information detailing: “BRIGHT LIGHT..AHHH..SLEEP IS OVER.” “Gooooooood morning Mr. Goodwin, how are you?” said the Shaving Lady as she concurrently sprayed what seemed to be glacial imported water directly onto my groin area from a spray bottle…”Brahhhhhhhh” went my mind as I struggled to answer….”Uh, good good good, how are you?” … “Fine Mr. Goodwin, sorry to rush, but had to get the kids to school and the husband was late from his night shift, so I need to hurry in order to not hinder the first surgery of the day” …. She had a quick staccato English delivery, the diction was not imperfect and she began immediately to begin shaving all of my midsection for the surgery that was to follow. “Okay Mr. Goodwin, you are OK now? The nurse will be in later to take you downstairs” … in my mind I thought I was also ‘OK’ prior to being sprayed half awake and raw shaved but no matter, I was quite OK now, and may have even lost some weight in the process. I also thought about how many people have seen my penis in the past three months, I would argue that at least 5 times more people had seen its middling presence in this amount of time than in the past 30 years of my life (unless there are photos online that I am not cognizant of). The loudspeaker called out at 7:30 AM that aside from those involved in surgery, everyone else was “Welcome to join us in the Lounge for some breakfast!”…the message was always cheerful in saccharine rich voice not unlike the matrons from “Girl Interrupted”..a factor of the nut-house that was becoming all too familiar.

Prior to surgery I was told that I would be the last patient of the day. A fact that was explained because I was apparently the healthiest patient to be operated on that day. Well, this was an interesting development, would the surgeon be tired? I thought to myself. Would the surgeon be thinking about the new girlfriend that he just started dating? Well, as long as the wife didn’t know, who cares right? Would he be worried about the fact that his daughter is not marrying a Sikh…but some Tamil rabble who was not worthy of the substantial dowry of a well established abdominal surgeon! The shame. Distraction…that was the handmaiden of the end of a cycle of routine. Distraction was the trait that ruled the roost of the human mind at the end of day. I am not immune to this harrowing deficiency of the brain…I would often think of the fire-brewed Stone Hammer Dark Ale to be enjoyed after many hours of filing farm insurance claims or of the triple gin and soda after rustling up the pickers on the night shift in the heart-blackening warehouse job in Kingston after a 15 hour day. The difference of course that if my mind slipped into distraction and I mis-filed a claim or short-talked a subaltern in the warehouse the slight could easily be remedied with a file audit or two medium cups of coffee with a makeup-chat respectively. A surgeon being distracted by the confines of the mind at the end of a 25 surgery a day routine could lead to an artery being severed, a testicle being lopped off, a urethra being infected, a bowel being punctured, a level of anathesia being administered at too high, or even more unnerving, too low a level…an instrument being used that was un-sterilized from the last surgery, a groin area being opened on the wrong side, etc etc etc….these were the concerns as I reached for the Toronto Sun in order to distract me from the notion that my surgeon would be distracted during the hernia repair…hoo-boy, I was becoming slightly un-hinged but I quickly put these fears to rest by reassuring myself that the surgeon was a professional, this was not some bush hospital in 1876 Sudan, this was a modern facility, in Canada no less, and I was certain everything was to go according to plan at 2:00 PM, no big deal. I laid on the my bed doing the cross-word as Roommate was interrupted from his 3500th text to his Girlfriend or Hockey-Buddy or Gym-Buddy or Helicopter Mom or Weather Reporter or Professor or TA…(who knows) by the angelic nurse of the pre-op and was walked away with a rather tentative look on his face. It was around 11:30 AM and the obligatory PA system message for Lunch rang over the airwaves in my room (Please join us, except for those with surgery today, for a lunch filled with fellowship in the lounge..etc etc), I was not terribly hungry as I ate five muffins (3 Bran, two Cranberry) at the 9:30 ‘snack and bitch’ the night before and I continued to peruse the Sun with increasing annoyance at the obvious Republican-Populist-Libertarian Drivel that continued to distort reality and convince the every-man to continue to vote against his interests, to continue the ‘forward’ march into free-avarice oblivion that will destroy the social-contract, will destroy the boring, plodding, prudent, yet incredibly fiscally and socially successful Canadian model of private-public synthesis that marked our greatness for 150 years. No no no, why worry about the collapsing of the Ontario manufacturing sector or the surgical sausage incremental politics that are eroding our freedoms? Why worry about that when we can be amused and emotionally invested in the big If…could Toronto Mayor Rob Ford really lose the weight in his self-administered challenge? Yes, it seems that Distraction is the constant in all affairs these days, although some things are never new under the Sun.

As my mind was melting at the asinine incredulity of today’s idiocy in all levels of public and private life, the Angelic Pre-Op Nurse (I forget her name) came into the room and told me it was my time to be brought Downstairs to the Pre-Op area. She smiled with a strong caring apprehension, not apprehension in the worry that my procedure, and that of all the other patients would go awry, but with a apprehension of profound and genuine empathy…this nurse was the Real Deal, she obviously truly cared about her charges or patients (or she was an actress worthy of high acclaim) and she gingerly yet gently brought me downstairs while concurrently telling me what was about to happen. First, once we arrived downstairs, I was to be placed in a comfortable bed and would be administered ‘medication’, after which, she stipulated the time frame would be about 35 minutes to an hour (was I ordering a Pizza?, I thought). Then I would be brought to the operating table for the ‘simple’ hernia repair that would itself take ‘around fifty minutes’ to complete. So, the sojourn seemed to be a rather easy affair, the Polish MMA guy must have been correct in his debrief about Surgery Day, all was to be well and good. We were in the elevator (the nurse and I) and she pressed the button to the floor of the first floor lounge but pressed the button that opened the back of the elevator, the button that required the key to operate, the opening salvo of the Surgery was ominous and unsettling.

Perdition: Thy name is Hernia. Part Four

I was feeling confident about surgery the following day and decided to go back to the third floor Shufflers lounge and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs face-off against the exciting 2012 edition of the Calgary Flames. There are two observations to be made about the TV culture in a Hernia Hospital. The first is that I would not want to be a female patient within the confines of a hospital that caters to Hernia repair exclusively. The reasoning is simple, men suffer from a much greater instance of Hernias (my source is observation, please refer to a medical journal, and/or I will insert proof later), I would reckon that the ratio is 30 men to 2 women. This makes for female consternation with regards to TV watching, to the scent of the place, to the manners at the dinner table, to the overall functionality of the place: it caters to men. The TV problem really takes precedence over all other facets of male-dominance in the hospital. The only thing on was sports, it was absolutely the only thing that was apportioned onto the luxurious 65 inch digital High definition screen. I must confess that I am not a die hard sports fan, I like Hockey, I like skiing, some soccer, figure skating (Yes I do), proper boxing, and most individual sports. But not religiously, not in the manner that others do. I don’t analyze the standings, I don’t know immediately who was traded where, I don’t know about the assault charges or the drug addictions (although that would be interesting), I thought March Madness had to do with exams. So, it was with bemusement that I took in the real face, the true essence of the sports fan, but more than that, I witnessed the Leafs fan in action.

Back to that later, firstly though, the women who ventured into the TV area of the lounge usually lasted for, well, 35 seconds if they did not have the usual electronic appendage in the form of blackberry or Ipad. She walks in, gives the look around, no one acknowledges her presence, she asks, “So, whats on?”, ”…” , “uh, OK, well, hmm, just like at home eh? I don’t have the remote! (Nervous Laughter)”, “…, yeah, you know how it is with men (Confident laughter of men overcompensating/ trying to be apart of the ‘brotherhood’ of powerless fools)”, “ah, well (sigh, she resigns herself to her personal glowing screen and/or moves into the table and chair section)”. I say nothing, I acknowledge nothing, I look around quickly, I see failure and fraudulent bonhomie, I see men with no power, I see women longing for a strange likeness, something to validate their presence in this enclave of stench and corroded dreams. The husbands of the women eventually come, with their sons in their hockey coats, and the husbands, the visiting husbands, now take their place in the ring of hockey watching, in the ring of silence, the stubborn, bitter silence, that the wife never bought into, that this hapless family, dad driving the forklift between midnight and eight, thinking and planning for his sons eventual success in making it to the ‘show’, sometimes fuming at the son “why didn’t he take that pass right…jeez. I flooded the bloody backyard and I ran plays for five hours…and I work ten hours a day, all for Todd and Blake to screw up?! They won’t make it past ‘C’, c’mon!” All the while the wife comes home after taking calls at the insurance company, taking the “Yogurt Challenge” or some other insipid grasp at meaningless and vapid self-improvement…watching her life vanish before her eyes, the moment never even passed, it was never there. And so, she sits now, at the card table in the Hernia Hospital, playing solitaire, and staring out the window while her husband, not a patient, stews in front of the Leafs.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a hockey team in the National Hockey League. Their history, to a certain extent, is illustrious, but moreover, the team has been unlucky. Unlucky in management, unlucky in outcome, unlucky in coaching, unlucky in mentality, and most importantly, due to, or the reverse of these former facets of unluckiness…the team is unlucky in their fan base. Yes. I grew up on the West Island of Montreal, a veritable enclave of middle-class meritocracy and a joyful mix of Francophone, Anglophone and smatterings of Allophone 15 minutes west of downtown. I knew one Leafs fan growing up, a great friend and a hot tempered man of Irish extraction now living in Chicago, and I am not certain he remains a Leafs fan now. But really, the majority, and I mean 90%+ of my contemporaries were Habs fans..(another beast that has recently begun to turn ugly and bitter). Some friends, those who liked to turn the screws of the Habs fans..were Nordiques or Bruins fans…both were considered maladjusted contrarians and welcomed with open hearts into our circle of friends. Anyway, the point is that I knew very little of Ontario culture, and the culture of “Leafs Nation”. I have lived in Ontario in a more or less permanent fashion since the fall of 2003 and have, for the most part, tolerated the experience with fairly moderate enjoyment (I believe this is the default setting for living here).  I was friends with Art-Types and Music Geeks, and my best friend from university, like me, is a current affairs/ Personal Computer game nut and we watched sports at no time. Therefore, my experiences with the Leafs fan began only in earnest when I moved, with my girlfriend at the time, to Guelph, the town in which she grew-up.

But, really, only at the Hernia Hospital did I witness the Leafs fan in his true habitat, in his true essence. Diane Fossey would have swooned at the prospect of the experience. The game was part-way through as I lumbered gingerly onto a corduroy easy-chair and began to soak up the madness. “Ah”, I thought to myself, “excellent chairs, really plush, but not too soft, not much give, perfect really” and suddenly a man began to have, or so I thought, a terrible fit of Tourette’s: “For F__K’s Sakes..do it right you f---ken f_g_ot! Godamned fkin idiot, whadda piece of s—t…nice one Burke, great fkin job there, ya fkin f-g!!”…Whoa, what was that? A smallish red-faced man, sporting the accent of the eastern reaches of Ontario, I would say he worked in a warehouse between Brockville and Cornwall, was spouting these incredibly ridiculous and abhorrently offensive epithets at the passive and indifferent television. Then I realized, in my mirth regarding my chair, that the Flames had scored, I believe Cammalleri provided the play or set-up, and the leafs were down a goal, or something like that. He was favouring his groin, this crazed maniac, but the grimace on his visage was beyond mere pain from surgery, no, this was Twenty Year Hate, Twenty Year Bitterness….he could not have been older than me, that is to say, 31…and I would say he was happy for the first ten years of his life . . . Until that one fateful day when his grandfather and he went to the Maple Leaf Gardens for a night that would change everything, it was the winter of 1991 and the Leafs beat the North Stars 6-1. The young chap from between Brockville and Cornwall became, therefore, essentially possessed, in the demonic sense, by the demon ‘Leafs Fan’. They came close in those years, to, you know, Winning It All, as they say. But they never did, and for the next Twenty Years, picture the mug-shot composites that the police use in Oklahoma regarding the downward spiral of meth-use. The boy’s face began to harden into a grimace of absolute sour-bitterness. The Leafs fan, not the casual fair-weather fan who trades stocks in the day and rents expensive women from the Belorussian consulate at night in Toronto. No, the real fan is the guy who works a crap job for 80 hours a week with no pension, a Sour Bastard without equal. Other true blues began to start weighing in with equally incisive commentary and soon I was surrounded by a maelstrom of seething men, screaming, grunting, gesticulating, bashing, and abruptly leaving from the scene. I tried to hide my amusement and horror and I think I succeeded, my chair was in a darkened corner of the room, and besides, I was still one of the new guys, and my opinions would count for nothing in any event. However, the dark cloud of insight and realization began to pour into my mind, as it always does, and I thought as I quickly looked over at the 500 piece puzzle box with frayed corners and the ‘bookshelf’ with battered condensed reader’s digest novellas. I flashed back to the angry, bitter, and radically unhappy hockey watchers…and the insight came in strong and true: This is a Madhouse. I was to ascend out of my own chair, I was the last one in the lounge, or at least the TV area, and walked back to my room. Preparing for sleep before the Big Day, or as some of my follow patients would probably call it, Game Day.