My Fat Wednesday Weight Loss Strategy

Several years ago I got assaulted. I didn’t provoke it, I didn’t get anyone angry at me, I wasn’t arguing politics nor religion with anyone, nor was I racist or abusive of anyone. They came from behind, sneaked up on me, and assaulted me, as cowards often do. When it happened I was walking to the soccer field to play football. I was an assuming simple fit white male in his late 30s. It happened during the day in the middle of a university campus. Before it I was quite fit, after it I developed some dysfunctional coping strategies that lead towards tremendous weight gain.

One of these coping strategies that I developed to cope with my pain and trauma of enduring violence was to go shopping every single day. Another strategy was to buy a lot of junk food. Another strategy was to buy coffee too often. Needless to say I was gaining weight and losing money. Within a year I gained 60lbs and was in debt a few thousand dollars. But I was happier than not doing these things. This coping strategy allowed me to forget what took place, to forget how “weak”, “pathetic” and a “loser” that I was. These thoughts were what I ascribed to myself after the ordeal. They won that fight, didn’t they? I kissed the ground while they laughed. Clearly I was the one who didn’t prepare for this fight my whole life.

Generally I spent my days back then playing football for 3-4 hours a day, then changing in the washrooms, eating from the food truck on the corner, and sitting comfortably at the libraries composing music on my laptop and studying from various books that were on the nearby shelves. I was a student of life and of many subjects as well as pursuing my hobbies. I wasn’t preparing for a fight, I wasn’t training in combat skills, I wasn’t using weapons. If anyone knew the fight was going to happen and saw how the two sides were living their lives, they’d say I was wasting my time. The bullies were training in martial arts, fighting amongst themselves and with thousands of others well before encountering me. The fight was won before it even began and I was always going to be on the losing end.

Back then, before the attacks on me, I didn’t shop often, hardly ever, except for food. I made lunch the night before and brought it to university in plastic containers, warming it up in the campus microwave at a building near the soccer field. The only reason I bought food at the food truck is because I loved the idea of socializing with others in front of the food truck, and the people selling the food were quite nice to chat with. Once or twice they even gave me a free lunch for how much they loved my company. I got to know about their children, families, all sorts of life details that make people glad to see each other. But after the assault on me I couldn’t face anyone and I withdrew. This is when I began shopping.

Some days I’d go three times to a coffee shop and twice to a fast food place. I was charging everything on my credit card and racked up quite the debt. My minimum monthly payments were over $250 and that’s just the interest, without lowering the balance. I had to make a change. Plus I couldn’t fit into most of my clothes anymore, let alone my favourite sports stuff. I went from size 34 shorts to size 42. Back then I weighted 180lbs but after the assault my weight skyrocketed to 260lbs. Something had to change because I didn’t like where this was heading. I was coping my way but it wasn’t the way I wanted to live. This new victim life style wasn’t ideal. I loved sports, I loved being physically active, but now I sat at home eating and watching Netflix all day and chatting online. This was a new me, one I didn’t approve of.

So I came up with a plan a while ago and have seen tremendous results. It started off as a joke. I called it Fat Wednesday diet. Every Wednesday, Burger King has a discount on Whoppers, which I love buying. And the big change was that I decided instead of buying fast food whenever I felt like it, to only buy it on Wednesdays. Either a Whopper or something else, doesn’t matter. But Wednesday was my fattening day. On all other days I would make food at home. Over time this diet evolved into an entire life style.

Next I tackled the coffee issue. I decided instead of buying coffee multiple times a day I would limit it at first to just one cafe visit a day. Then I lowered it even more to just Tuesdays and Saturdays. I also lowered how much caffeine I am consuming when I make coffee at home on other days by making it half half or going fully decaf. As well I added tea to my assortment of drinks. One of my other dysfunctional habits was that I was buying a 2L bottle of coke very often. I added this to my Fat Wednesday and decided to only have coke on Wednesdays with my Whopper or other fast food.

On my calendar I noticed that Tuesdays I buy coffee, Wednesdays I buy a meal, and Saturdays I buy a coffee.  This gave me an idea.  What if I bought something every single day of the week, this would give me that therapeutic shopping experience and a reason to go for walks every day. I would walk for an hour and then buy something. So I made Monday my grocery day. On Fridays I buy fresh salad ingredients from the market and Sundays I buy something sweet like a cookie. So what once was shopping whenever the mood struck me, became a budgeted and planned exercise in healing.

Shopping allows me to control my interactions with others, makes me feel safe in that I am not randomly going places, and it ensures I have money left in the bank. The Fat Wednesday diet is therefore me cooking at home and eating out only once per week. This is quite sensible and is what many experts recommend anyway so I’m good there. Most days for breakfast I make healthy oatmeal with fruit. For lunch I have a soup and a small sandwich, and dinner I have with my family. I don’t put sugar into my drinks, and only have artificial sweetener on Tuesdays and Saturdays in my coffees.  I don’t use too much salt, I don’t buy chips, candies, or anything with sugar in it, not even bottled sparkling water. I also don’t feel like I am giving anything up – this is how I was raised. If anything I am returning to my childhood roots with this diet. I eat fruit almost every day so I have no need for sweets. Fresh oranges and apples and strawberries keep me perfectly happy.

So far on this diet I have lost 15lbs, and have paid off one credit and canceled it and am working on paying off my other debt. I am less afraid, less need to cope, less suffering from trauma and more enjoying life and doing things almost as much as before the events.  I am back to composing music, and I am exercising at home almost daily. I do thirty minutes of Tai Chi almost every day, sometimes I do Qi Gong, sometimes I practice with a Kettlebell and dumbbells, too. Life is getting better the more I stick to the Fat Wednesday diet. Buying something different every day is also fun even if it isn’t anything expensive. People like me don’t need a lot to make us happy. For instance, when I do buy coffee it’s never at Starbucks. It’s never a $10 cup or a $5 cup. My coffee costs $2.50 and is freshly brewed. Otherwise I make it at home for pennies. My ultimate goal is to again wear size 34 or 36 shorts, to slim below 200lbs, and to again play soccer while listening to music.  I am slowly achieving my dreams again.

Drinking Beer As A High School Dropout

Here I am in my mid forties, sitting all alone in my home office and drinking beer and watching old video games for the Dreamcast console. I have spent the whole day on Twitter, avoiding my chores, projects, and hobbies. The first of April is coming and a huge decision looms over me – do I enroll in a high school course towards completing my OSSD? Do I try a third time even though I had to withdraw from class the previous two times? Do I want to admit that I’m such a big loser that I couldn’t even finish high school by trying, once again, to do what the rest of you did in your teenage years?

When I was a teenager, it was the mid-’90s and life was grand. I lived in North York (Toronto) and loved every single thing I did. My hobbies included learning Slackware 1.0 (Linux), programming in C++, downloading warez (games), and composing music in trackers in DOS. High school at the time offered programming in boring Turing, biology, chemistry and physics and geography – who cares!  What a bore!  Studying covalent bonds, whatever those were, didn’t seem half as interesting as how to get LILO (pre-GRUB) configured on my 386sx-16mhz machine with 4mb of RAM.  Before long I was skipping classes.

It got to the point where my Calculus teacher asked me why I skipped 80 of 88 classes that year. I had no answer, I just told him math didn’t interest me. This wasn’t the real truth, for I loved calculus. But what was I going to say to him? Gee, learning from a blackboard and paper and pen is lame and computers are the future? Everyone who was smart knew that Linux would be the future. Back then we didn’t have Google, or books at the library, so I had to learn everything the hard way. Through trial and error. I had to use the man pages a lot, too.  There weren’t forums the way there are now, and there definitely wasn’t AI nor experts I could collaborate with. Everything I had to learn by changing one line at a time with plenty of print statements, and this held true for configuration files as well as source code compiling.

Many years later, after I had dropped out of high school and got a job in Toronto’s tech industry I would excuse my bad decision of leaving high school by saying there simply wasn’t enough time. And it was easy enough to buy into this illusion. I first noticed my faulty thinking when I explained this lack of time to my grandma. I told her my daily activities included hanging out with friends, rollerblading, coding, writing music, and playing with Linux. My grandma looked at me stunned, and she said that I was wrong in how I looked at things. She reminded me of her experience in high school during World War II! She had to take a train to school, not a subway. And at that it was a cargo train, without seating. She had to do homework, but also house work to help with the family, she had to cook, sew, clean, etc. I never did any of this. All I ever did was sit and stared at a computer screen. When I thought about it seriously, what my grandma said made sense. Except I was listening to it 25-30 years after the fact. She said I had time for both, school and personal projects, just like she did back in the ‘40s.

This was difficult for me to accept. I had always told everyone as well as myself that I was following in the footsteps of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – dropouts who made it big in tech. I felt I had made it big, too. In my 20s I was making more money than those who finished university and had “wasted their lives earning a piece of paper” – as I used to explain.  This of course wasn’t the reality. When I was a teenager my parents divorced. And a way I dealt with that was by imbuing myself into computers. I would put on my headphones and stare at the screen doing work and so it was a form of escapism or avoidant behaviour. Going to school meant having to deal with realities at home, which clearly I didn’t want to do. Writing music was more fun than studying chemistry or biology or physics even, but I had time for both. I could have had my mom help me at the dinner table after dinner for an hour every day!  I could have done my home work, passed my exams, and still composed all the music I wanted. I would have still had time to hang out with friends and play video games with my sisters. My grandma was right. I lacked time management skills. I was also poorly coping with the family situation.

Oddly enough there were no councillors calling my parents when I skipped class. My parents never talked to me about my missing of classes either. I don’t recall my dad ever asking me why I was home and working on Linux instead of at school. There was never a moment when a teacher asked me why I wasn’t showing up. I did still attend high school, but only the classes I liked. I would show up for lunch hour to hang out with friends, and gym was always what I was in. I sometimes attended economics as that interested me. I naturally thought tech would lead me towards running my own business. None of it ever materialized. THe lack of organizational skills I failed to learn in school lead towards a disorganized adult life. I had plenty of success in the tech world, but whenever something complex was asked of me I avoided it and skipped out. There were moments I even skipped out on work whenever a presentation was required of me. I got fired for it, too.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that this April I’ll be enrolling in high school classes as an adult. I have to admit to myself that for thirty something years I have been living wrongly. I have been pursuing things the wrong way, walking along the wrong path. I will need maybe five or six credits to graduate. I’m not looking forward to any of this. But it is time to set things right. It is time to finish high school. I believe my grandma was right. I believe I still have time for everything.

On Balance In Life

For as long as I can remember I had great balance in life. Or that is the image I’d like to project anyway. I don’t want to admit that I was obsessing over certain things because I feel the things that matter to me are universal and quality things in life. Above all else I value kindness, patience, hard work and love and peace. I am not a fan of conflicts, violence, or bullying nor do I like cheaters, criminals, or those who are in charge but really shouldn’t even work a lawnmower by themselves. So when my whole world came crashing down on me in my twenties it certainly was someone else’s fault and not a question of balance, right?

There I was, in my teen years, living in North York, in a street called Valleywoods – the nicest place I have ever seen in my entire life. We rented a townhouse, white with a black roof, we had a backyard that overlooked a forest with a river, too. It was heaven on Earth. During the day I’d go to school, middle school then high school, but in the afternoons I would spend time on my computer. I did everything available to me back then. Mind you this was before there was Google, YouTube tutorials or even books on digital art at the public library. I didn’t know anyone who was into computers as much as I was and so I had to painstakingly master every subject on my own.

In those years, unlike what popular media has you believing about teenage boys, I didn’t get into fights, I didn’t smoke nor do drugs, I didn’t drink or go to parties. Instead I was studying Linux, programming in several languages including assembler, I was doing 3D animation and mastering Photoshop image manipulation as well as composing over one thousand songs. I was at the top of the world! I also managed to squeeze into my days rollerblading almost every day for an hour, and in the evenings after dinner my best friend Abisaac would pick me up in his van and we’d pick up other friends and go places like Taco Bell or the movies. This is balance. Proper balance.

Through it all there was always my family with whom I spent time every day and even on weekends. My two sisters and I played a lot of Sega Genesis games, and watched shows like Babylon 5 and cartoons together. We bonded over these activities even though there was a seven year difference between us. I loved them dearly and it showed. When my parents got busy with work I would prepare dinner and even pick them up from school! This is a further extension of proper values and kindness that is so inherent in balance of life.

This all extended into my twenties when I worked for several tech companies here in Toronto. My day job involved sitting in a cubicle and dealing with various tech things. At first it was providing technical support for Sprint Canada’s dial-up Internet. Then it was building a database in Microsoft Access for Patriot Computers for an entire call center along with a graphical front-end and reporting tools for managers. Finally came my ISP job where I worked at a network operations centre (NOC) supporting Canada’s Internet backbone for a Tier-I provider known as UUNET Canada, and later Worldcom, which went bankrupt by $11B. Sensationalism is an American invention I think but this was a huge deal in the business world when it happened and soon after I left the company.

During this time I maintained balance in my life as well, despite being super busy. At home after work I continued my tech hobbies of composing music, digital art. I also had a fish tank and maintained it and enjoyed looking at the fish from time to time. My girlfriend was living with me and I enjoyed tremendously spending time with her. There was quite a few months when our Blockbuster Video habits of watching movies resulted in a bill of $500 just for VHS tapes and snacks in one month! Was this a lack of balance? Or a sign of tremendous joy? We watched a movie every night, we talked a lot, I composed a new song every day, programmed, worked 9-5 and was even the emergency on-call for the network after hours and at nights. I even managed to have a gym membership and with my work buddies we’d go several times a week.

And yet I wasn’t achieving anything of my dreams! It sounds like I had balance all figured out – but in reality none of it was fulfilling my needs. You see I didn’t want to have a girlfriend before I bought a house. I didn’t want to work for the same tech company for six years, I wanted to go explore other places of work after a year or two. I didn’t want to live in the same city all my life either, I wanted to move and explore. Despite working and playing so much I never once went on a single vacation to Hawaii or any other place. The only thing I could find to do with my vacation days at work was to take Fridays or Mondays off and have a longer weekend during which I wasted my time by playing XBOX games on my large CRT TV.  I wanted to have a dog, a backyard, a two storey house, with a tree and a garden. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to rollerblade, to play soccer, to hang out with friends and go to parties. I wanted to go to conferences for tech, for personal stuff, comic cons. I wanted to go to a concert or a sporting event every now and then. I didn’t do any of these things. How is that possible if I had a life of balance? I was approaching my thirties and my biggest dream, of having children, of being a father, wasn’t being realized.

The trouble was I am also disabled. I had cataracts at birth, whereas most people had them in their elderly years. So I had low vision my whole life and many things were inaccessible to me. Also the women who showed interest in me weren’t equally contributing to our relationships. For example, the woman that lived with me while I worked at UUNET didn’t work, didn’t study, didn’t do anything other than watch TV and eat food all day.  I was raised to believe that in love we accept the bad with the good so I tolerated this. And besides I loved her, I was not her father to tell her how to live her life. But here I was saving for a downpayment on a house, working overtime trying to save up money to build a family with her, and she was sitting there on the couch asking me what’s our next movie.  Day in and day out. It wasn’t working, it wasn’t fair towards me – I did all the work and she simply sat around like a kid enjoying herself – and so I ended it.  That’s when I noticed my life was out of balance with my dreams. Sure I had a job, and friends, and many computers, and a big TV and a surround sound system, but I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have photos of me on a beach with my dog running through the waves. I didn’t have home movies of a toddler growing up to be a man. I didn’t have what I wanted the most – love.

This was because my life was out of balance with things that mattered most to me. My life was balanced according to the normals of North American values. Money, job, shelter, food.  But not heart, spirit, soul.  So I started anew.  I quit my job, and went to find balance by living with my grandma for a few years. It was the most reinvigorating period of my life. And I did find balance in Belgrade once again as I knew I would. It was the most wonderful time in my life and I had the most fun that I can ever remember having. I slimmed down, gained muscle, helped my grandma declutter the attic and garage, took care of her when she needed it, played with local kids all day soccer, and in general relaxed composing music on my laptop. I found balance once again. And this balance didn’t depend on material things. It was based on real values from my dreams. Balance is only possible when it’s tied to our most inner cherished desires. Everything else is a lack of balance. It doesn’t matter how much money we have in the bank, nor how high a status we achieve in the corporate life. What matters is the heart.

Superman Goes To Jog

My motivation is determined, in large part, by what I foresee myself accomplishing. If it’s something small I don’t even begin the task. If it’s monumental, I immediately drop every other project and get to work. I don’t plan my days, weekends, or quarters. I just wing it – that’s my time management philosophy, it’s always worked and I’ve always achieved more than most, until now. I am in a rut, the dumps, and I’m struggling to climb back to the top of my mountain top.

About ten years ago I was quite fat, weighing close to 260lbs. I am 5’10” and generally look best at around 185lbs even without a large muscle build-out.  But at 260lbs I am wobbling when I walk, my clothes don’t fit me right, I’m wearing baggy size 42 pants, as opposed to my more usual 34 or 36 shorts. When I am fat I don’t want to move, climbing stairs to my apartment feels like a chore so I take the elevator many times. Even carrying groceries and tying shoe laces feels like a difficult task where I have to hold my breath just to bend down to the shoes.  Being fat is quite limiting as it even negatively impacts my sleep. When I am fat I don’t enjoy sitting at the computer as I always want to go and exercise, only I don’t have the energy to so it’s a constant struggle. That’s when my super achieving ego kicks in. I call it my internal Superman.

My inner Superman makes me want to exercise at three times the intensity to make up for lost time. It makes me want to go for a jog when I haven’t even warmed up. It makes me want to lift 100s of pounds of weight at the gym when I haven’t even done a few lower reps. It makes me want to jog for 3 hours on the first run day of the season. Then when I have knee pains for a month, when my back hurts, and when I have a cold, then I think some secret magic voodoo was involved against me, that the whole world hates me, and then I stop working out. My inner Superman thinks he can do anything, and doesn’t care about the process. My inner Superman thinks I can jog even when it’s winter, rainy and slippery, or muddy even though I was blessed with disabled eyes and thus stuck for life with low vision at best.

I explained my predicament to my sister Lola a few years ago. You see I have two sisters, so I get double the advice, which I sometimes listen to. And I have started to listen to Lola’s jogging advice this year. First I began by changing my diet. I have swapped out pasta, butter chicken, and burgers for lunch, for soups and a boiled egg and a small sandwich – all of which I now make at home to save money and sanity. Then I took Lola’s excellent advice, as she is into running and has ran marathons several times. She told me to take it slowly at first, since I’m not a regular, and to ramp it up as I feel good in my body. Instead of jogging for 40 minutes in the cold she suggested I limit my first runs to 15 minutes at most. And even then to run for one minute and then walk for a minute. But the Superman inside me isn’t pleased with this. This feels like a pittance compared to what I want to achieve. Superman inside me wants to be an ultra-marathoner, to run 24 hours non-stop, to be the best jogger in existence. So for a few years now I’ve put off jogging because running and stopping makes me feel like I’m not really doing anything.

This was a great mistake and one I blame Superman for. He wants to achieve world shaking things, whereas I just want to fit back into my pants in my closet that have been waiting for me ever since my Kung Fu training days.  And then I had an epiphany!  What if Superman can be happy at the same time as I’m jogging properly? But how? How to appease his appetite for speed and duration while running start-stop like? Well, by looking into the future!  If I run without limits I will incur injuries and then I won’t be able to run or do other things at all, as has happened in the past. But if I take Lola’s advice, and start slowly and then over time ramp it up as I build stamina and muscles and muscle memory, in a year or two I’ll lose the weight and garner enough time jogging to be able to jog for a full hour non-stop!  After a year of start-stopping Superman will have what he wants. But I must endure the training period. And that’s only natural isn’t it? Training first, then success.

Superman doesn’t believe in that. In the movies about him we never see him training.  Or at least this was my mistake in thinking. I recently re-watched Superman and he does go through training. He discovers his powers one by one, like when he’s running against a train, etc. He doesn’t start changing the course of rockets, or moving frozen lakes on his first day on Earth. These things come with time! Similarly the Superman in me needs time to train. So if I wish to go for a jog while listening to a full music album, which is my goal, I need to take it slowly. This is what I’m learning this year. Coupled with my new diet, I feel I am on a winning track. Much thanks to my sisters and their advice. Superman will go jogging later.

Dreams of Montreal

Burger King is a restaurant selling mostly burgers. This is obvious. Montreal is a city in Canada. This is also obvious. Today when I tasted the Angry Whopper for the first time the two became quite similar.  And now I am making plans to move to Montreal from Toronto.  All because of a chance trip long ago, and my taste buds.  Who knew something so simple could be so magical.

I have for years lived in Toronto.  And have for years eaten the Whopper at BK.  The two went together and were almost inseparable.  On Wednesday’s BK lowers the price of the whopper, and like most disabled people I am living in poverty so this burger is one of my few thrills in life.  Another of my thrills is composing music, as that’s my main hobby and source of joy, but burgers are an instant gratification sort of thing. Within 5 minutes of eating I am happy as a little kid.  Whereas music composing takes hours and hours and days of grueling technical labour in a DAW like Reason to produce just the right sounds that soothe my perfectionist ears.  But today, for the first time, I took a chance on a Friday, to go to BK and try the Angry Whopper at full price.

It was mind-blowingly better than the Whopper. I didn’t open it up to look at its contents like I usually do with new food. I trusted that it would be awesome, and it didn’t disappoint at all. BK has done an amazing culinary job I feel.  Now granted, burgers are not the healthiest of foods and should not be consumed very often for various reasons.  As well I am leaning towards a vegetarian or vegan diet these days and so burgers are a rare meat delicacy I still have, reminding me of nostalgic feels from long ago when life was much better.  You know before all this technology came to save us from paperwork, from red tape, from waiting in lines, all the things that are even more part of life than they were before the saviour arrived.

This is exactly how I enjoyed my two or three trips to Montreal. I didn’t look up on the Internet where I was going, I didn’t look at a map, I simply got on the train or in a car and went to visit my sister or when I was in high school in the ‘90s we went to see a baseball game there.  All those times I went, it was an amazingly fun experience. In fact, Montreal seems to still possess that old world magic that is lacking from the grey boring Toronto where I’ve lived most of my life, sadly.  The people seem friendlier, the language is more soothing, streets seem safer, everyone seems more laid back and relaxed.  I didn’t notice ever the kind of ugliness that I feel surrounded by in TO.  And then there’s the Montreal cafes, which somehow are charming, compared to the utilitarian ones in Tdot.  I’m not sure if it’s just me romanticizing something I’ve only ever seen three or four times, or if it’s a genuine difference.  But I trust in this difference, with my whole heart.

So just like from now on my monthly burger is the Angry Whopper, I see myself in the future living and working in Montreal. What I wish to bring to the city is my music, my art, my coding expertise, my networking, my peaceful nature, and my desire to make it a better place than it already is. I have started making plans a while back for moving there through various tasks I do at home. For one I have started brushing up on French with Duolingo.  I take it seriously and study it an hour a day at least.  I can’t yet fully understand TV shows but thankfully here in Ontario we have two fully French channels and I watch them every day a little bit, a show here or a cartoon there, just to get the ear of the language.  I believe knowing French is a very Canadian thing, along with knowing English, since Canada is a dual-lingual nation.  So it’s also one of my long outstanding goals ever since I failed grade ten French.  It was my first class that I ever failed, and I wish to make up for that ever since.

The second step I have taken towards moving to Montreal is related to the dream of owning a condo and working in the tech industry.  Montreal has a lot of tech companies, and I have spent much of my years in tech, whether coding, doing technical support, or working for an ISP.  I do know a thing or two about ‘puters!  So I’m taking courses now in programming, focusing on web development and video game design.  I am working on my own video game in Unity that I hope to publish in a year’s time.  My main hobby is writing music in Reason.  I have already published two albums and have three more that will get published this month.  I keep composing every day for an hour at least and will be publishing a new album every month this year. All this together will hopefully allow me, a disabled man in his 40s, to move and to thrive in Montreal.

I don’t really know anything about the city mind you.  My sister lives and works there, but my designs upon this dream have little to do with her. She was the enabler I suppose, by inviting me over a few times and showing me her neighbourhoods and her work.  It definitely helped me to fall in love with Parc Fountaine for starters.  There I saw a part of my future along with the Mount Real.  I imagined myself jogging to the top and then back down every morning.  Then a shower and going to work every morning.  This is my dream.  So to this effect, this summer I will start jogging here in Toronto. First I need to lose about 20-30 lbs of fat so that the jogging isn’t hard on my knees. To achieve this I’m doing Qi Gong, and practicing Kung Fu daily as well as lifting weights and going to the gym.  I am working towards my Montreal dream on several fronts concurrently and hoping that it all pans out. I trust in the process that I have designed just like I have trusted in the process of writing music for all the tracks I have completed.  And let me say that I’ve done over 1,000 songs so far totalling about 20 music albums.  You could call me a musician.  And Montreal is definitely full of artsy people like me.  I see this as a win-win situation for me and for the people of Montreal.

A Luxurious Adventure In The PATH

Like any disabled man I long for those moments of inclusion whereby I am one with the normies. You know, when you are wearing glasses you wonder what normal eye sight feels like? Similarly whenever I feel isolated I take a walk through the PATH to see all the employed, hip, and fancy fellow citizens and I pretend I belong. I sit there in the PATH eating my Burger King and feel like others looking at me might mistake me for a daytrader out to lunch. I don’t need a suit and a tie to be a daytrader, and I can fit in, as long as I shave my man face. But then comes the problem of going to the washroom, and this is for me something very stressful. I have low vision and signage in the PATH is terrible for those like me.

Usually I only walk around downtown Toronto between five routes that I have memorized. One takes me to Eaton center, another one to Distillery, another one to the PATH, and then within the labyrinth I know two or three routes. Otherwise I can’t go for a walk on my own. I just don’t feel confident in my old age. And let me tell you, 45 is quite old. I’ve survived 33 Canadian winters and many others in Belgrade. This in itself is quite an accomplishment! I’m very proud of this fact. But I did fall once or twice on my hip so maybe I’ll pay for that in my elderly years, I don’t know. Like any man I need more muscles to defend the fragile skeleton that the meat hangs off of.

Finding a washroom would be easy if signage was large, clearly labeled, and in easy to spot places. But in Toronto’s underground PATH the big fancy business owners decided to go with minimalistic style. So much of the signage is in the corner, out of the way, hard to spot, hard to find, and is even black icons on a grey background – of all things, come on! How am I supposed to spot that? So sometimes I beg my dear mom to come with me to PATH and teach me where the washrooms are. After two or three times I have it memorized and can go there alone from that point forward. Unless I know where a washroom is I can’t go to a place. I am like everyone else in this regard. My disability is visual but that limits me to ten percent of activities that others can enjoy.

So today I went by the Hockey Hall of Fame entrance and needed to use the bathroom. Now for some strange reason the cleaning staff synchronize when they are cleaning bathrooms. They do it at peak times, around 1pm, and they clean multiple washrooms at once so that none are available for public use. I went to one, it was being cleaned. I went to a second one, it was being cleaned. But I needed to go, so I discovered a third washroom around the corner of a corridor. The signage is poor and barely visible and I entered. Boy this was something magical.

The washroom had a waterfall, there was a little pond with fishes swimming in it, it smelled like cookies and cream, and there was no smell that I am used to in normal washrooms of feces and urine. There was no papers on the floor, there was no hairs around the sink, it was clean and tidy. There was also mood lighting like at a club! There was even music playing, it was dubstep of all things. I was in the stall minding my business and wondered if I made a mistake if this was some kind of private club washroom or something. It was unbelievably clean and nice and the toilet seats all worked, even the flushing wasn’t broken! Then I went to wash my hands, and to my left was young woman prettying herself up by tidying up her hair.

This was unusual, I have never seen a woman in a washroom before. In a corner was another woman standing playing on her cell phone. I immediately left and looked at the door sign. Now it all made sense. The reason why this washroom was so much more beautiful than any I have ever been to was because this was a woman’s washroom. The sign for women and men is quite similar, only the little square is a tiny bit triangular. Who knew women had such clean and luxurious washrooms compared to us men?

I prayed and hoped nobody would notify security. But just to be on the safe side I contacted a psychiatrist and explained what had occurred. He told me that yes, indeed, women’s washrooms are much nicer and that many men in his practice have made this mistake and have accidentally once in their lives entered the wrong bathroom and to not worry. He assured me I was sane. I questioned why do women have a waterfall in their washrooms and men do not? He said he didn’t know but would inquire and let me know. It did leave me speechless that even the floor was shinny like it was brand new. I’m used to the filth and the scum on the walls in men’s bathrooms so much that I thought women’s must be the same. Boy was today an eye opening adventure in the PATH. I hope that in the future men can learn from my misadventure and learn to invest more in their spaces. I’d also like a waterfall soothing me while I am in the bathroom.

The End of All Fast Food

Just the other day I was walking past A&W, a place mostly known for burgers but now they’re expanding with some kind of cafe style sandwiches, too. Here in Toronto the current prices are about $15 for a proper meal. A basic sandwich can be had for $10 or so. And an ad caught my eye. It said two “Mama Burgers” for $8. I thought what an amazing deal and immediately went in, ordered it, ate it, and felt great.

But that’s when reality hit me, right after I gave them my hard earned money. That was a clever strategy wasn’t it? You don’t see it yet do you? They have tremendously inflated prices and then for half the price offer what appears as an unbelievable deal, two for the price of a half. I’m used to a “Grandpa Burger” costing around $15. That’s one burger, though it has three beef patties. This was two burgers, and two is more than one, and for half that price, $8 instead of nearly $16. So obviously my brain got confused. As did many of others. This is typical psychological attack on consumers and one that bothers me a lot.

One of the other things I can’t resist at A&W, despite their prices and despite my poverty being high, is their spicy chicken sandwich. Sometimes they call it Nashville Chicken. It is almost $11 for one. So one day I took it home and analyzed it. Why can’t I make it at home for cheaper? I mean I make my own software with Linux. There’s free versions of Linux tools for everything that the Windows ecosystem sells. So if that is possible, so might me cooking in my own kitchen!

The spicy chicken sandwich is basically two pieces of bread, a piece of chicken, lots of spicy sauce, a little bit of pickles, and some mayo. Nothing else! Is that worth a full ten dollars? Probably not. But they do have to pay for staff, rent, taxes, and profits. None of these aspects are my concern. I’m only concerned about the final product and the cost. So I went to No Frills and for $10 bought a package of ten chicken burgers. Then I went to the St. Lawrence market and at a gourmet shop bought my favourite hot sauce, Scotch Bonnet, for $5. Then I bought Polish Pickles from the deli upstairs in the market for $6, and I bought a whole loaf of bread for $3. Though I could have saved on the bread by buying a day old bread from the fresh bakery for $1.50! But I wanted to splurge. In total all the ingredients cost me less than $25. But it was enough to make ten burgers. That means each complete burger costs me only $2.50!

Now tell me again why I would ever step foot inside of A&W, Burger King or McDonald’s? Because their chicken is uniquely flavoured? Because their sauces are so much better? Because the atmosphere of standing in line with strangers is so enticing? Because paying nearly 5x as much is somehow saving me that much time? I don’t see the winning strategy here and I now consider myself a fool every time in the past I stepped foot into these establishments. I feel I was used and robbed. There is never going to be a time in my life when I’m going to feel sorry for a business and pay five times for the product that I can make at home in less than three minutes of total prep time. If ever I want fast food I will make it myself. Besides, tell me a place that sells chicken burgers with feta cheese! Because that’s what I just had. Game over bros.

The Mind Candy Between Us

As I am disabled with low vision there are many jobs I can not do. Especially in a culture that is disrespectful of those like me and does not make things accessible let alone affordable. While I have been unemployed for the past twenty or so years, in my twenties I had a job working with Cisco and Juniper routers supporting the Canadian Internet backbone in Toronto. I worked for a Tier I ISP and enjoyed my daily tasks very much. I loved going to work, I loved the half an hour commute by subway, I even enjoyed assembling computers and writing music in my spare time. It was a lot of fun.

My hobbies were typical of any so-called geek. I followed tech blogs, I wrote blogs, I wrote music, made 3D art, edited videos with a pro camera, even painted a wall green so I can do special effects. Back then the big thing was a program called Shake, which was complicated. I had a habit of learning everything myself without books just by reading documentation and help pages. This is also how I learned programming as a teen.

While learning Turbo Pascal and assembler in the mid-’90s I also encountered the demo scene. A demo is a sort of music video. But it isn’t shot using video cameras, and it isn’t made using 3D animation software. It is made using pure mathematics in programming languages. It is a real-time demonstration, hence the name, of graphics routines synchronized to music. Some demos are megabytes big. But there are highly skilled coders who can make a full 3D engine in as little as 4k (4,096 bytes) of code. Another popular category of demos and intros is 64k, a bit larger than 4k thus the quality of visuals is better. People organized themselves into groups and each group would produce a production, or a demo, several times per year. These became so popular that events were held, or gatherings, where they competed for first place in several categories. One of the most popular demo groups is Future Crew. There are many these days on YouTube in simple video format for anyone to look at. But back then we’d download actual executables and run them in DOS and sometimes in Windows.

Obviously like any geek and coder I also wanted to code my own demo. But as a teen I never found anyone in my high school or neighbourhood who was a programmer, let alone who knew assembler or what a demo was. All my friends were barely managing to get online let alone to do advanced things that I was playing around with. I mostly browsed the huge Pascal library, SWAG, and experimented with demo routines found there. BBSes (pre-Internet) was another method by which I got a hold of source code examples. I lacked the math knowledge required to produce my own voxel landscapes, for example, or to rotate 3D objects on a two-dimensional plane. I was spending so much time working on demos and on coding and music projects that I dropped out of high school and began working for an ISP. Typical story by now I suppose. I was also the first in my high school to carry around a cell phone everywhere I went.

So later in my twenties when I worked for another ISP I was surprised to meet a guy who also loved demos and knew what they were. We had a lot of fun conversations. Many times I’d invite him over to my place, and we’d drink and play XBOX. Sometimes he’d spend the night, as he lived in another city and had to get the train so it was difficult to do when we gamed all night. And that’s when I discovered Mindcandy. It was a DVD project by Fusecon I believe, it’s been many years since then. Sometimes demos didn’t run perfectly on various hardware configurations and back then in the early 2000s there wasn’t much in terms of videos online to show what they were like. YouTube wasn’t yet a big thing either like it is now. So someone got the best hardware possible for each demo, and capture cards, and made videos, perfect ones, of demos and mastered the audio properly, and put it all together as a proper professional production on a DVD. It cost a mere $20. I obviously ordered one and was blown away by it.

I showed it to my friend and he loved it so much that he borrowed it. Back then we all were making several thousand dollars a month, which was a lot, at least for me. He had a house, and I had a one bedroom apartment. I was saving money towards buying a house in Toronto, too. But as I prefer to help other people, I was contributing quite a bit to various charities. I was always shocked at work when the United Way campaign came around every year and most of my coworkers didn’t want to participate. It always bothered me that they were like that. Many of them had various reasons, too, that some might label as excuses. Some claimed that I didn’t know enough about this charity and that they mishandled money and had a too high administrative fee. This was the reason some executives had for not contributing. I didn’t care about those details and felt that charities like United Way are important. I was an immigrant and still am in many ways, and have always depended on others’ help. So I know first hand what that is like and so it made sense for me to help others. They probably never had that experience and unfortunately many in Canada can only feel what they have experienced and nothing beyond that. This was also the case with my friend who was into demos.

A week later he gave the DVD back to me and said he was impressed and watched it several times. Then at lunch time we chatted on IRC, there was no Discord back then, and I asked him if he’ll order a copy for himself. The more people order the more likely volume 2 will come out and maybe volume 3 and many more! I wanted to see many DVD productions of demo groups’ works!  But he told me flat out that no, he won’t even order one copy because he copied mine! I was very upset by this. I mean, he was part of the scene, he knew how much work each demo production entailed. He also had a job like I did, and we made similar money, so I knew he wasn’t poor and could definitely afford a measly twenty bucks! It was upsetting to my very core. I asked him why he copied mine and why he wasn’t respecting the work. He said it’s not about respect, it’s about the fact that he could make a copy and why spend twenty bucks if he didn’t have to. He still didn’t understand it.

For me this was a definite deal breaker. He wasn’t a man of integrity like I was. He wasn’t honest and honorable like I was. He expected to be paid for his hard work every day didn’t he? Yet he wasn’t willing to pay others for their entertainment creations? That’s theft, blatant theft. And I don’t want to associate with such people. Through Mindcandy DVD I discovered his true nature and never again invited him over. I also stopped hanging out with him almost completely except as demanded by work. I was still friendly towards him and hoped he would order a copy and change his ways. But as I discovered many in Canada are exactly like him. I was just a good person from a good place who was too naive to see it sooner, to see through all the deception. Mindcandy remains one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life. Watching that 2 hours of demos felt like being at a demo party, and perhaps that is indeed why I ordered it. As I am disabled I can not travel alone, and nobody to this day has ever taken me even on a vacation, let alone making something like a demo party accessible to me. Mindcandy is as close as I could get to attending a live event. And I am eternally thankful that Fusecon put it all together. If they charged 3x the price I would have paid it gladly. I only wish through the years that I didn’t lose my copy of the DVD, but that is life.

Strange Motivation of Cancer

At the age of fifteen I sat in math class, front of the first row as I have low vision, and even this didn’t allow me to see the blackboard very well, and I was keenly aware that a guy sat behind me who was very talkative with others. I decided to ask him a question about factoring and he was able to teach me that concept. From then on Beez and I became great friends and I always imagined he would be present in my life.

As a teenager I imagined every day would be the same thrill ride of fun, joy and exploration. I spent hours with my friends in school, I spent hours with them after school, then I spent hours with my computer and with my Sega Genesis. What’s not to love? And why would life ever have to change? I never imagined I’d have a family, a job, that I’d move away, that my dad would die, and that I would get cancer. I never imagined that I’d be poor, abused, tortured, locked up and abandoned by everyone. I never imagined that Russia would wage war against Ukraine, I never imagined the Japanese nuclear problem due to the tsunami, I never imagined the events of September 11th, I never imagined anything bad happening ever to me or anyone else. I always felt that life would go on like this, in this perfect loop, forever, for all eternity.

And now I have colorectal cancer in my 40s and I don’t know what to do with myself. A dear friend died of cancer about ten years ago, Mike. He always had a smile on his face and we always called him Smiley, and in fact that was his email address while he was alive.  I have limited time left on Earth but then when was that not true? Maybe as a teenager I was well aware how finite life was and thus I was enjoying myself as much as possible?  Maybe I felt immortal and thus was always living it up?  Do we enjoy life more when we know it’s finite or when we think it’s infinite?  Some argue that to enjoy life there must be a finish line, death, otherwise we’d linger doing nothing with our time were life to be endless and infinite.

I don’t agree with this sentiment. I don’t enjoy songs because they have an ending. I don’t enjoy books because they have a final chapter. And I certainly didn’t enjoy Harry Pottery movies because I knew there would be an end to them and that other movies would interest me afterwards, other movies about magic that is. I didn’t enjoy my first relationship with a woman because I knew it would end. And I didn’t enjoy a meal my mom cooked because I knew it would be over in ten to fifteen minutes. The end of things, their finiteness, is not something I calculate into my joy of things. I enjoy things in their present state. When I’m writing a song I enjoy the process of creation, of exploring sounds.  I am not focused on finishing a song, on producing it and releasing it to the people on some streaming platform. I am more concerned with whether or not I am having fun for the thirty or forty hours it takes to write a great track. I enjoy every second of those forty hours of labor! It isn’t like I wait for the climax at the end that whole time. I am jumping to other songs at the end, anyway, so there is never an end to my musical exploring. But the moment I enjoy the most in a song is perhaps that stage where a new few notes become an idea worth exploring into a full song. Not all songs go through that stage, and in this aspect it’s kind of like a relationship or a friendship. Some people will forever be just acquaintances, some people will forever be flings, and some people will become best friends while others will be lovers and wife material even.

Cancer is one such thing. It is the end of all life, it is the beginning of death inserted violently into our lives, or at least into my life. One moment I was kicking a soccer ball at U of T, another moment a cop was assaulting me for no reason, and a third moment I was diagnosed with cancer and dying. All of these are moments, and nothing more, moments in life that could have been instead surfing on the ocean, eating a hot dog and making love, but they weren’t those moments they were these moments, different moments than what I had wished for. They are moments dictated by the wars you all chose to fight instead of to work and live cooperatively developing better health care, better technology and better means of fighting cancers and other illnesses. Russia now wants to fight Ukraine and so the whole world must crawl to a halt.  People didn’t take good and proper measures so covid was allowed to spread around the world much more than it should have. People didn’t take steps of caution around Chernobyl so generations suffered from mutations and disabilities. People didn’t take care not to pollute and instead thought they all deserved a car so for thousands of years the Earth will have to suffer from pollution.  Instead of all of us caring about each other, most people are competing with their neighbours to the death.  Instead of cooperative team work, we have competition and infighting. 

And so healthcare must take a back seat to war.  Tools of the trade must take a back seat to bigotry and curse words.  Good literature must take a back seat to porn and lay terms.  This is why I’m dying of cancer.  It’s not the cancer that’s at fault, it’s the rest of you with your competitive thinking and your capitalism and your communism.  Man needs to unite if it is to have a future.  For me it’s already too late, but don’t let it be too late for all of us.  Don’t let the cancer of mankind be our desire to be numero uno.

Canceling Game Pass Due To Violence

As long as I can remember I enjoyed playing video games. I would not call myself a gamer, nor do I enjoy e-sports. I find the whole concept of competing in video games ridiculous. To me a game is about myself, about having fun, not about making money, not about being best, but about relaxing from other activities. It’s a form of centering, of finding balance even. For this reason I don’t enjoy them when they are overly complicated. My favourite game is still Pac-Man.

Two or so years ago I subscribed to Microsoft’s Game Pass service at $50 for three months of service. But since that time I have not played more than a few days worth of games. The deal gives me access to an ever changing roster of titles, roughly about 100 games a month. It seems like a good deal and it is. Even Halo was available, one of my favourite games. And I really love my XBOX One. I have the All Digital Edition, with no annoying discs, and it cost only $150. For a disabled man like me who is always missing money that is a great deal for entertainment. When a Game Pass game is available I simply select it and it installs like a normal game that I purchased. When it is no longer in the Game Pass roster I simply remove it. Very easy and intuitive. Yet I never played games all this time but kept paying for the service.

I am very saddened by my cancelation of the service and will subscribe again in the future. A few years ago I was assaulted, several times in fact. Before the assault I used to enjoy playing video games. After the assault playing games began feeling difficult and in my mind just the same as a house chore. I had to force myself to sit in front of the TV. Even watching television shows seems difficult. In fact many things that came naturally before are now difficult. A lot of games have elements of violence in them and it is these elements that I have become sensitive to. For example, I can not enjoy scenes in movies that show jails, police, or hospitals, as these are all related to my trauma. I no longer enjoy cop and robber shows, nor do I watch the news. So my canceling of Game Pass has nothing to do with the service itself and everything to do with my emotional state after being assaulted.

Every day I work at fighting my trauma and at improving my simple little life. One of my most treasured hobbies is writing music. Ever since I got assaulted I even stopped doing that. I was very fit before but now I’m obese. So there’s a lot in my life that has been negatively affected by a few violent people. As a result of eating more food for comfort my finances are also in a problematic state. I’ve been turning to junk food almost every day for years ever since the events. I find food comforting and safe. It tastes good how could it be bad? But it is bad and I’ve almost stopped eating out entirely. I’ve also developed an addiction to coffee and tea and kept spending money at cafes where I sat alone endlessly consuming drink upon drink in some attempt to take my mind off of the events and the memories of a better life I had before being a victim.

My credit card gets maxed out by the end of the month, I drain my savings, and I reach an actual zero at the bank. It makes no sense to pay for Game Pass if I am not using it and if I am tight with money. Well, it does make sense though. If I can force myself to play games every day I will definitely be improving my quality of life and I won’t be sitting in coffee shops as much. So that is my goal for the next little while. XBOX has a vast collection of free games, as well I can buy a cheap game on sale here and there. I will make it a daily habit to play XBOX for an hour no matter what I feel about it. As well, I will play one game until I finish it, which I think is better than starting ten games and never finishing any. Games are difficult for me as I have low vision, but I can still see well enough as I have a large screen TV. Then in a couple of months when my finances have stabilized with my new budget, and when I have developed a good gaming habit contributing to relaxation and a better mood, I will once again subscribe to Game Pass. Microsoft has given me something wonderful to aim for so much thanks to them. I look forward to a day when a police siren will no longer frighten me.