Scott Williams

In The Beginning There Was Energy.

Published on September 11, 2019September 11, 2019 by Scott Williams1 Comment

Sometimes I like to think about geek stuff, as my wife calls it. Flying from Lodi last night I was pondering the origins of the universe and quantum theory. I know just enough about those kinds of things to realize that if I had another life to live I would have become a physicist.

Everything you were taught in high school science class about atoms, about gravity, the limitations of the Speed of Light, and the perceived certainty of life on other planets, if you are over 30 years of age, is wrong. There is no nucleus with electrons floating around it like the rings of Saturn. The speed of light may not be the barrier you thought it was and Star Trek may have been right all along. You may wonder why there aren’t aliens dropping by and you should probably spend five minutes reading about the Fermi Paradox.

Even gravity isn’t what you think it is, unless you have a working knowledge of spacetime. The earth is pushing on spacetime like a bowling ball on a trampoline, and planets are warping the fabric of the universe. Gravity has nothing to do with that burning magma at the center of the earth. Once again Science Fiction teaches us the value of physics when it is combined with creative imagination (disproving for the millionth time that being intellectually smart makes you brilliant person. But I digress, as usual.)

If you allow your imagination, or a decent YouTube video, to shrink you smaller and smaller you will soar eventually into the subatomic Marvel Universe. This is Ant Man so its ok if you are wearing a cool outfit. As you grow smaller and smaller you will shrink to a tiny ant, than to a speck and then an arrangement of molecules, until you exist in the realm of the atom. This isn’t the Physics 12 Course you took, but a quantum micro-verse of strings and motion and your imagination. On the most basic level you live among trillions of element-level blasts of energy forming everything in the universe from your toothbrush to the rocks on the planet Cybertron. Go Bumblebee. Everything that ever was and is and is to be is formed by music and motion and little bursts of energy. Energy doesn’t need a universe to contain it, it is more elemental, more ethereal, less material. Try to find a description that actually tells you what energy is in the real world. You have 30 seconds to describe energy to me without using the word ‘force’ or ‘converted’ .

Here is the bullshit explanation from Wikipedia – “In physics, energy is the quantitative property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on, or to heat, the object.^{[note 1]} Energy is a conserved quantity; the law of conservation of energy states that energy can be converted in form, but not created or destroyed. The SI unit of energy is the joule, which is the energy transferred to an object by the work of moving it a distance of 1 metre against a force of 1 newton.”

It’s a property. Thanks for that. Not a tangible word about what energy is actually made up of or what it really is. It’s a property.

And when you think about it the Big Bang was nothing more than two strings of energy that went out of kilter. It’s easier to believe that energy always was – it is, after all, not really a physical thing. Energy does not necessarily need a precipitating event and we have really no idea how any of this stuff really works (although Physicists are much much closer than you may have heard).

Tell your kid to become a physicist. As Ernest Ruthford said, “Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.”

Energy is just a thing. Maybe it has always been there on some astral plane we don’t yet understand and those non-particles interacted and created more energy and that energy eventually became a thing; and like the Vidal Sassoon commercial taught us, they told two friends who told two friends and here you are today trying to figure out where that water is leaking from on your basement ceiling.

*thanks to Josh Clark and the excellent podcast “The End of the World With Josh Clark” for some of this information and the spark to get my philosophical muscles twitching.

Aliens May Not Exist

Published on February 20, 2019February 20, 2019 by Scott Williams2 Comments

We live in an amazing time. Within your lifetime we may no longer be dependent upon fossil fuels. By 2040 we’ll be driving electric cars or something even more magnificent. Tankers and cruise ships with futuristic batteries and entrepreneurs farming the plastics in the ocean for profit. Someday, in the not too distant future, they will know how to move your consciousness into something permanent and that generation will get to live forever. The capacity for humans to grow beyond biological dependence will afford opportunities for knowledge that confound the imagination. If we can survive the 2100’s there is a decent possibility that we will possess the technology to populate our galaxy. We’re planning to send people to Mars, right now. Global warming may kill us all but if it doesn’t, it appears that we are only at the beginning of what humankind may be capable.

It is entirely possible, though not popular to admit, that we are entirely alone in the universe. Scientists postulate that it takes just over 3 billion years to develop sentient life, and the universe is far older than that. Why is it so quiet out there? With 70 sextillion suns in the universe we should be swimming in Klingons by now. In a universe that is over 13 billion years old there has been ample opportunity for distant planets in distant galaxies to develop to the level where they can send out a message that we should be able to hear. In case you haven’t been paying attention, the recent technological advances in fields like astronomy are staggering. Science can now look at the beginning of the universe. Think about that for a moment.

And the news just gets worse. While most of us would like to believe in a Star Trek Federation, some very smart people have realized that enough time has passed that any civilization which may have developed in the distant past on other planets may be dead by now, if they existed at all. At the other end of the spectrum is the notion that life did exist, but it’s done by now. As hard as it is to imagine, there are solar systems much older than ours and countless fruitful planets could have invented gingsu knives literally billions of years ago. Billions. Logically we must assume that all games must end, and even a successful planet that started even a few hundred thousand years before ours would potentially, based on what we know about how stupid thinking beings can be, have blown themselves to that alien lizard hell a thousand times over. We’re not even mentioning the hundreds and thousands of happy accidents that randomly kept the idea of evolutionary growth alive in spite of seemingly impossible odds.

Imagine the technology we will possess in 100,000 years. You can’t. Think how far we have come since the Renaissance. We are alien gods to the people of the 14th Century; one look at your iPhone and good teeth would be enough to have you burned at the stake for most of our recent history. It is entirely apparent that we are only at the very beginning of human potential, we’re still the hillbilly predecessors in the eventual story of the growth of our species.

In over 13 billion years, it has been postulated, life should have evolved to the level where someone out there could hear or see us – somewhere among those hundred billion stars (and that’s just this insignificant galaxy). Any civilization that has even a few tens of thousands of years head-start could be smart enough to develop technology beyond our imagination. We may not survive the next hundred years if we can’t get those damn corporations and governments to take their heads out of their asses, can you imagine the opportunities for self-destruction we will have in the next couple hundred thousands of years? Can you envisage the potential for self-destruction we will experience in the next five hundred thousand years?

So tell me again, why can’t we find any signs of life out there?

I’m not even mentioning the apocalyptic fears around how such an advanced society would feel about a new upstart in their neighbourhood. Don’t even go there. If this twitches your geek muscles just google Fermi Paradox.

We seem, all over again, to be on the edge of incredible technological advancement. People who are alive right now could have grandchildren from Mars. We still have no idea how the Big Bang works or whether or not dark matter and dark energy even exists. How are photons in two places at one time? Are there really 11 dimensions of existence? How does something start out of nothing? Did Michael Jackson really not see that he looked super creepy and weird? So many unanswered mysteries still await us. Constraints such as the limitations of travel based on the speed of light, or our current understandings of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, may someday seem quaint and archaic, products of a pre-enlightened understanding of reality and science.

So it may not be that monumental of a stretch to say that we probably don’t yet have all the answers. While it is tempting to believe that we are the absolute pinnacle of human evolution, it may be worth remembering that every generation before us absolutely believed they understood how the world worked and what mattered in life. Priests and prophets and generations of ignorants were convinced that what they believed was the undeniable truth. They were certain.

Just for fun, let’s rip apart the notion of Atheism. One could argue that the belief that there is no possibility for anything beyond one’s limited understanding of reality (and meaning of life) is in and of itself limiting, predicated upon the fragile notion that we are even remotely capable of understanding the depth of the human experience at this early stage of creative evolution. Atheism is predicated on certainty and certainty could be, and don’t hurt me here, a little naive at this juncture.

Putting aside the limiting definition that “this is all there is or can ever be” allows me to leave room for wonder. Perhaps there is something out there beyond my understanding and some day another Einstein will help us understand life on an entirely different plain. Words like faith and fairytale definitions of eternity become possibilities, not because there is any rational proof right now, but based on the fact that we have not yet learned everything there is to learn. Certainty based on our current understanding of physics and reality may just be a touch premature.

And who knows, there might even be aliens.

Losing My Religion

Published on October 23, 2018October 26, 2018 by Scott Williams9 Comments

We are in the midst of a catastrophic change in western culture. The church, having ruled our lives for millennia, is experiencing a mass exodus – even if it doesn’t seem that way where you live. People are free to question things they were taught as children, often for the first time.

What follows is a coming-out-party of sorts. I didn’t write this but I’ve known Jason almost my entire adult life. The experiences he describes are real, when describing his commitment he is prone to understate his devotion. He is extremely intelligent and arguably one of the best public speakers in Canada. He isn’t pontificating or proselytizing or complaining, simply telling you about his journey (so please treat it that way). Some of you may know him, be kind. You may not agree with his sentiments but he is incredibly courageous to sign his name to this; but then again he has always been, and remains, a man of honour.

He will be ostracized. This is an incredibly important conversation that is not happening in churches or forums, and is laced with emotion on both sides. The fact remains, however, that millions of us are seeking to find out what we believe in an era that is confusing and polarizing.

This is Jason’s story.

Hi. My name is Jason. Officially I’m Reverend Jason Johnson. You see, I’m a former Pastor with the Free Methodist Church in Canada—an evangelical, right-leaning, conservative, mainstream Christian denomination. (More on the former part in just a bit.)

From my first day at Bible College to my last day in the office my career as a Pastor spanned nearly three decades. I received a Bachelors degree from a Methodist school and a Masters degree from a Baptist school. I worked in churches in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan. I served as Intern Pastor, Interim Pastor, Youth Pastor, Assistant Pastor, Associate Pastor, Church Planting Pastor and finally as a Senior Pastor. If I wasn’t working as staff in a church I spent my free time volunteering in a church. Further to that I served on the national Board of our denomination for several years and then on a committee that oversaw the training and development of new and emerging leaders. The church was my life.

Theologically, I would describe myself as a born-again, Christ-centered, Spirit-filled, Bible-believing, church-going Christian. I believed, affirmed, taught, publicly proclaimed and adamantly defended what I came to describe as “historic and creedal Christianity.” Meaning, the creeds and doctrines that historic Christianity developed, wrote down and taught. Things like the six-day creation event, a literal Adam and Eve, the Flood, the virgin birth of Jesus and his bodily resurrection, humanity’s sin and a holy God’s anger and wrath directed toward that sin but salvation is made possible only through mental, spiritual and emotional faith in Christ to take away our sins, and eternal reward in heaven for the saved and eternal punishment in hell for the unsaved. If you believed things outside this or contrary to these I labeled you misguided at best and a heretic at worst.

I hope you’re getting the sense of where I was at personally and professionally. You need to know where I was a few months ago and where I am today to comprehend the seismic shift my theology and practice have taken.

Just now I used the word former: “I’m a former Pastor.” You see, I stepped out of church leadership earlier this year. My last day in the office was January 31^st. I said “former” because I’m not taking a hiatus, a break or otherwise pushing pause on it with the intention of going back. I’m done with that professio

n and though they say you should “never say never”, hear me now: I will never be a Pastor again. I left that profession never to return. Nearly thirty years of devotion came to a screeching halt after only a couple months. In fact, I rarely attend church anymore and when I do it’s mostly social: my family likes to go and I genuinely like the people who attend.

How did this all transpire? What took place that would make me leave a profession and calling of nearly thirty years vowing never to return? A few things, actually.

In general, leadership in the church is very difficult. I’ve been antagonized, attacked, publicly shamed, blamed, sabotaged, thrown under the bus, and undermined by people who claim to be Jesus-followers and who believe deeply in love, forgiveness and grace. Being a Pastor has been a frustrating, confidence-shaking and lonely journey. Looking back now, I’m not sure if I was ever in a church and thought, “I love this place!” I’ve secretly wondered whether or not I wasted my life.

Four things transpired specifically to initiate and perpetuate my swift change.

One, I started reading books “from the other side.” That is, books that I would have described as heretical. Though they were written by Christians they doubted, disbelieved, downplayed and denied most if not all the historic and creedal truths. There was no Adam and Eve. No Flood. No virgin birth and no Resurrection. No hell. Probably a heaven. No universal sin and resultant need for salvation. Reading these books opened the door to the possibility that maybe not all of this is true, and that’s okay. Add to this my ingestion of copious amounts of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Two, I read again about how the Bible was put together. The Bible is an ancient document written by an ancient and primitive people. The events described in the Bible happened decades and even centuries earlier and, for the most part, describe a primitive people responding to barbaric times through a theological lens. Why did we get exiled to another place? Because we sinned against God and failed to keep his covenant. Why did we attack and utterly destroy a city? Because God told us to. Why were we successful in attacking and destroying a city? Because God was with us. The people in the Bible had a primitive understanding of cosmology, biology, human sexuality, the rights of women and children, and marriage, to name a few. Add to this primitive understanding the deep-seated belief that “God is on our side” and “we are God’s chosen people” and “this land was given to us by God” and you get the unfortunate atrocities of genocide, infanticide, abuse of women and children, and slavery. To this day Christendom doesn’t agree on the contents of the Bible. Catholics have several books in their Old Testament that Protestants don’t. Some strains of Eastern Orthodox church don’t include the Song of Solomon or the Revelation of John. Martin Luther didn’t want the epistle of James included. There were literally hundreds of gospels written about the life of Jesus that weren’t included in the New Testament and the four that are were written anonymously.

Three, I read the Bible. Penn Jillette famously said that reading the Bible will make you an atheist. I kind of agree with him. It’s not like I hadn’t ever read the Bible. I read it cover to cover several times. I read the book of Galatians in the original Greek. I read it every day. But this year I innocently took the “Read the Bible in 90 days” challenge. I spent a couple hours every night reading chapter after chapter and writing notes down. I began to see certain things emerge that I hadn’t before. I quit reading it because the historical events it described just seemed way too contrived, like somebody authored or doctored these stories rather than simply writing what happened. I saw how violent God and the people were. I saw the abuse of power that was initiated and approved by God. I saw God turning a blind eye to heinous atrocities (or worse, commanding them) and incredible moral failure yet casting horrible judgment on minor infractions. (In one story, a man, his wife, their children, their livestock and their possession were destroyed by fire from heaven then the whole lot was burned and swallowed up by a localized earthquake all because the man took a few special items.) I found it harder and harder to accept the stories of the Bible because in doing so I would have to ignore scientific facts, moral decency and modern sensibilities.

Four, I experienced profound disappointment in God on behalf of others and myself. For the past several months I have felt alone and abandoned by God. He has remained silent while I’ve been asking him for answers. God has become for me the proverbial father who comes home from work and sits watching TV. Though I beg for his attention he ignores me and remains silent. A friend of mine who faithfully and sacrificially served God for decades, who gave up luxury, marriage and parenting, was rewarded for her retirement with stomach cancer and died only a couple years later. In short, I’ve seen the righteous suffer while the wicked have prospered. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that bad things happen that troubles me. That I can handle. What I can’t handle anymore is bad things happening when God himself said he wouldn’t let bad things happen. Your foot shall not stumble nor fall. The one who watches over you will neither sleep nor slumber. Ask anything in my name and I will do it. Seek and you will find. If you, though you’re evil, know how to give good gifts, how much better gifts will I give?

There’s a scene in Happy Gilmore where a caddy tells happy, “I’m here to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.” Soon Happy does something stupid. He then goes to his caddy and asks, “Where were you on that one, dip shit?” I want to ask God the same thing. A 25 year old get killed in a car accident. God, where were you on that one, dip shit? My aforementioned friend dies of cancer. God, where were you on that one, dip shit? A sudden squall comes up and women and children drown. Go, where were you on that one, dip shit? God has repeatedly broken his promises, let me and others down, failed to show up, not done what he said he would do, allowed what he said he wouldn’t allow, and has therefore become unreliable and untrustworthy. Frankly I grew tired of making excuses for God and for giving and receiving meaningless clichés and platitudes to explain why God didn’t do what he said he would and why he let happen what he said he wouldn’t.

So where am I at today? First off, I’m a hypocrite. I will be the first to recant the above if God actually showed up and did what he said he would; if I actually received some answers. I would love to tell the world I was wrong about God and that he actually does give good gifts, look after his children and answer prayers. I like the fact that my oldest daughter reads her Bible every night even when she goes to her friends’ overnight. “Can you bring me my pajamas, toothbrush and Bible?” she asks. I like that my youngest asked to be baptized in the Shuswap this past summer. I attend church with my family and am still moved by the Pastor’s words. Just today I went by our church to see if there are any volunteer opportunities for me. We still pray as a family at meal times, before long trips and before bed each night.

Theologically I would classify myself as a Christian Agnostic. These don’t go together too often but with me they do.

I’m Christian in the sense that it’s my tribe; what I’m used to. I grew up in the church and it’s religiously where I’m most comfortable. I like the Christian story of salvation and reconciliation. That humans are unique above all other flora and fauna and lost and fallen makes sense of why things are the way they are. We’re capable of incredible good and despicable evil. I like that Christianity has some beliefs unique to it. No other religion has the Trinity, the incarnation of God and the death of God. I like the words and life of Jesus. I like that the supernatural is possible.

I’m an agnostic in the sense that I’ve embraced mystery. I know I don’t know stuff and I’m okay with that. I don’t know why God does what he does. I don’t know if God cares for us. I don’t know why God doesn’t answer prayer. I don’t know if the Bible is the Word of God. When we embrace certainty, especially religious certainty, things go south rather quickly because what we generally mean is, “I’m certain I’m right and I’m certain you’re wrong.” Certainty divides us and creates a mechanism whereby some are “in” and some are “out”. Embracing mystery lifts the burden off our shoulders of having to explain God and God’s ways and lets us live how we want to live, without judgement.

But, I would probably mostly describe myself as a practical deist. God is up there and I’m down here. If we meet sometime, great; if not, I’m okay with that too. I don’t pray. I don’t expect things from God. I don’t thank God anymore for the good things in my life. I’m not waiting “to be led by God” anymore. I’m taking my life and destiny firmly in my hands. If I win it’s because of me. If I lose it’s because of me. God isn’t helping me and probably never did.

That’s my story. I was *here* and now I’m *here*, never to return and I’ve never felt so free, alive, and myself in my life.

And I’m not alone…

(If you are capable of acting with integrity/insight and have honest feedback (and wish to contact Jason directly) you can email him at revjohnson@shaw.ca)

** Scott here. I’m not going to publish any comments that are arguments about theology. That isn’t what this was about.

Published on October 12, 2018February 20, 2019 by Scott WilliamsLeave a comment

From another project I’m working on called Reality Therapy:

Vaping is a thing.

It wasn’t long ago when I was told that vaping was considered a smoking cessation tool. Much of popular culture is still under the delusion that vaping is an almost innocuous habit that is instrumental in helping people quit cigarettes. Vaping is safe, right? What we’ve been learning in the last couple of months, much to our chagrin, is that vaping is much more insipid than society seems to understand or is at the very least, willing to admit. Let us lay a few thoughts on you.

We’ve been polling high schools and teachers and EA’s and social workers and the teens themselves, and in the Fraser Valley people are telling us EVERY week that as many as 70% of high schoolers in this area are vaping. Surely that can’t be true. That number, even if it is overly generous, is staggering. And it gets way way worse. The amounts of nicotine that teens and adults are ingesting has gone through the roof. Just today a teen told me that teens everywhere are now doing 30mg+ level. Only a year ago it seemed like the heaviest smokers were embarrassed to admit they were at 12. Teens regularly report numbers as high as 36 or even 50mg. A cigarette is equivalent to somewhere between 4 and 16mg. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that vaping has no end game (chain vaping) or that there are very real signs that vaping creates an oral fixation. Teens around here report vaping all day, every day. They stress if they cannot touch their vape.

But they are in class for 6 hours, you point out. That may be true, but our sources gleefully admit that they smoke WAY more than they used to, often at 5 or 7 times the nicotine levels. We know people who vape when they get up in the middle of the night to pee.

So we have been asking youth audiences: “a new kid comes to your high school having never vaped. How likely is she to pick up the habit?” (Coincidently, we often ask teen groups this question with regard to how long it takes a new nerd from Saskatchewan to be offered weed. You don’t want to know the answer). Everyone to whom we have thus far posited this question puts the percentage north of 60. If a majority of kids are vaping, what chance does the average immature teenager (who is neurologically wired for experimentation and social bonding) have?

It’s a cultural shift.

We have no idea the effect this will have on our health, although all signs point to bad. A recent NBC article pointed out that “Smoking e-cigarettes delivers cancer-causing chemicals that get into the body — and popular fruity flavors appear to be the worst, researchers reported Monday. They said teenagers who try vaping may be poisoning themselves with many of the same chemicals that make traditional cigarettes so deadly. Tests on teenagers show that those who smoke tobacco-based cigarettes as well have the highest levels of these chemicals in their bodies, but those who vape e-cigarettes also have higher levels of the cancer-causing chemicals than nonsmokers do, the team at the University of California, San Francisco, found. “The presence of harmful ingredients in e-cigarette vapor has been established‍; we can now say that these chemicals are found in the body of human adolescents who use these products,” they wrote in their report, published in the journal Pediatrics. (Such claims and positions are vehemently challenged by the vaping community, lending further credence to the argument that we still don’t really know how this is going to play out in the next few decades).

I thought vaping helped people quit smoking?

It tastes like strawberry. Nothing is more sexy than a bunch of poser teens trying to look cool while vaping cotton candy. It’s almost as if having a flavoured nicotine delivery system that tasted like watermelon was designed to appeal to young users. Hum. People are vaping on buses, the driver isn’t paid enough to care. High schoolers have even told us that kids are vaping in class, as soon as the teacher’s back is turned. No one is going to admit who the culprit was, and those ridiculous helicopter parents will mutilate any teacher who dares to mete out a group punishment. Geeks vape. Hockey players vape. Christian kids vape. Even athletes vape, though allegedly at slightly lower levels. Parents let their kids vape in their home, they simply don’t know how to respond to such a persistent addiction and a grouchy detoxing teen. Is it really worth the fight?

It might be, although there is so little factual information on vaping that it’s almost impossible to be sure. Did we say addiction? We meant two addictions. Smokers have not traditionally insisted that they get a dome rush (head rush) multiple times a day, but our clients regularly report that most trips to the smoke pit are capped off with this nicotine rush; that can’t be good. They’re smoking incessantly, at higher levels, until they get a buzz.

Have you heard of zeroing out? Just hold that smoke in until you can breathe and nothing comes out. There’s no way that could be bad for you, right? Did you know there are other things besides nicotine that you can vape? Don’t worry though, strawberries are good for you, right?

So what’s the deal with vaping and why aren’t we talking about it?

As with so many of the issues we will be arguing about in our upcoming podcast, it seems that as a culture we are blindly walking into a future for which we have so little real information. We are technological guinea pigs, we aren’t even close to understanding or even recognizing the potential damage from vaping 16 hours a day, and we haven’t a firm clue about the effects of drug legalization, giving a 9 year old a phone with unfettered access to porn, or even if Facebook and others are attempting to invade our privacy and fill our walls with video screens reminiscent of some freakish nightmare out of George Orwell’s 1984.

What is the effect of checking your text messages 400 times a day (yes thats a thing) on your brain? How will the legalization of marijuana affect an entire country? How many people, some of whom will have a proclivity towards addiction, will start to smoke pot now that it is legal? (Yes some people don’t do drugs because of the law). What is Dawn going to say when her teen tells her he wants to drink/smoke/vape/have sex? What does it feel like to be a marginalized person? Is technology messing with your mind? Is there really much difference between diagnosis and palm reading? Why do some men think women are crazy? Is addiction really a disease? Would you know if you’re a psychopath? What does it feel like to be high? Can anger be a drug? Should you be yourself if you’re an idiot?

Join us for our upcoming podcast series Reality Therapy as Dawn and Scott deep dive into the fascinating and fruit-filled world of vaping, sex, technology, mind palaces and youth addiction, brain science and strains of weed, cell phone addiction and weird people. Nothing is out of bounds and we guarantee you won’t hear anything like this, anywhere else. All that, and our infamous “Top 5 Things Parents Do Wrong”, coming this winter.

Dawn Taylor M.A. RCC
Scott Williams M.A. RCC

Grabbing The Wrong Handholds

Published on September 5, 2018February 20, 2019 by Scott Williams1 Comment

They made me watch CSI, Ginger Version. I don’t even know what the real name is but it’s the one with the redhead guy who tries so very hard to sound like the coach from Rocky. My youngest Matthew and I are forced to endure this for an hour and there has literally not been one line of dialogue that anyone would say in the real world.

At first we didn’t understand, how could it be so bad? Not one person used normal inflection or words that, when put together in a stringy thing called a sentence, would actually be spoken by a human who is not on a show about super cops who don’t know how to talk like normal people. It vaguely reminds me of when I did acid except the walls aren’t moving… yet.

I can see them speaking but nothing makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, a ferret could follow the dialogue. It’s just that the dialogue is so incredibly vapid, so devoid of reality and voiced by such poor actors who all believe they are on Die Hard, except it’s less realistic than those Christmas plays you have to endure when your kid is in grade five. No one can stop squinting and the dude who just said, “Have you considered the weather?” sounded like he was attempting to take a burrito dump. Not a single person had a spontaneous thought and the lighting is off and the dialogue feels like it was written by that weird kid who wore a cape to grade six and sat beside you in Socials. I keep looking around to see if people are laughing. My son Matt is laughing. So proud.

The real Shakespeare famously penned, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. These players couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper nutsack. Rock stars and wrestlers and models can become actors so you know there is real art involved. And don’t give me your “but there are some very talented actors”. So what. I know some incredibly talented welders who can fix my CR-V. Actors are massively overpaid to do a job that everyone wants because they get treated like royalty and get to buy islands and large phallic boats. It says a great deal about our culture that people line up in their thousands to catch a glimpse of these botox clowns, inbred royals, and idiots on CSI who make twenty times the money I ever will.

Honestly, models can do it. What the hell.

We have given our allegiance to actors playing gurus and trusted in Bill Cosby to be our television dad. Some of us honestly believe that the top 1% gives a rat’s ass about the struggles you are going through. They can’t remember, or never knew, what it was like to be an ordinary bloke. They live fictional lives.

A few of you know what it is like to take LSD (remember Purple Microdot?). I work in the addictions field while doing several other things during my week and in over 12 years of doing Intake I have never met an addict who identified Acid as their drug of choice. You can get seriously messed up for only a few dollars, but still it is rare to talk to anyone who thinks this is a good idea every day of the week. Hallucinogens allow you to step outside your own body and observe yourself from a very surreal and often screwed up perspective. This family of drug use has become increasingly popular, yet again, among predominantly younger adults who read somewhere on the Internet that you could eat mushrooms and become a philosopher. There is some interesting research with hallucinogens, especially in the psychological arena, but you rarely read that “Kierkegaard got totally wasted on shrooms and wrote Fear and Trembling”. Many of us solved the world’s problems on cocaine but couldn’t read the chicken scratch when we woke up later that same day. That is literally a true story. I was so sure.

And a bad trip on Acid will scar you forever.

Contrary to what the internet is telling you, you are probably not going to find the meaning of life if you do MDMA, although you might love everyone for a few hours. Smoking a blunt may temporarily take away the angst but this place is way too complicated for easily blazed answers to your problems.

The 21st Century is ridiculously complicated and fraught with information that is completely new in the history of primates. Coping skills which have worked for millennia are suddenly obsolete. Even as recently as the Dark Ages hundreds of years could pass for our ancestors with little discernable change. Most humans grew up, lived and died within a few kilometres, and went to bed when it got dark. There was no constant bombardment of new and confusing data unless you were being chased across the highlands by the bloody British. More than half a millenia separated Attila and Genghis but they still killed people from the back of a horse with relatively the same range of weapons. Just think how much the world has changed since World War Two, or even the early Sixties. You have had more world shaking cultural changes in your lifetime than people would have seen in hundreds, even thousands of years.

I haven’t even mentioned the Internet, perhaps the biggest game-changer since the Enlightenment. Sometimes I become so entangled in the sheer absurdity of our existence that it’s tempting to feel like I’m in a bad episode of CSI Miami. Nevermind, they’re all bad. My parents lived in homes where you had to throw coal into the fire every morning. My son, who still lives at home part-time, loses his mind if I turn off the router at 11 p.m. Our ancestors could beat the living crap out of us without breaking a sweat. 21st Century problems in a world moving so fast that no one has a clue what the answer is or how we are going to deal with our growing cultural addiction to stimulus and response and Instagram and sugar.

Few of us trust our local churches to provide solutions for life and you can’t trust the government anymore because they really are spying on you. The Catholic Church is in freefall. Google and Facebook are actually messing with your mind, and I’m not talking in some groovy metaphysical way. They are literally reprogramming your brain. Your phone is apparently tracking you even when L ocation Services is turned off. Institutions that we have trusted for generations have let us down and it feels like we are losing our handholds.

Our worlds are filled with information and most of that data is mindless drivel. Is coffee good for me or bad for me this month, I can’t remember. Is Pluto a planet again? Was that dude from Making of a Murderer guilty or not? Is gluten still the Antichrist? We can no longer trust our grade 11 math class to make sense of this augmented reality, and after what seemed like twenty years of enlightenment and walls falling and peace treaties, the world is suddenly scary again; full of regimes with small penises and very large guns. We’re in a pissing contest with our neighbouring country over milk. Seriously, milk. How do we make sense of it all?

How do you end an article like this? Oh ya, I remember now.

Handholds.

Any rockclimber can tell you that running up an indoor climbing wall has very little in common with climbing an actual mountain or rock face. In the real world there are few perfectly formed nubits to grab every 2.5 feet. Rock faces are often wet, smooth, filled with vegetation or bird crap. So much bird crap. There are often no obvious routes and the ones that appear straight and narrow consistently prove to be unclimbable. In the real world the handholds are far less exact, less climate-controlled, and less exhilaratingly obvious. It’s incredibly easy to lose your way in this world.

You need to be reading. I’m not screwing around anymore so listen because I’m not making this up as I go along and any counselor worth their bread will tell you that if you aren’t growing then you’re going backwards. For years I’ve told clients they need to read and study and take their emotional growth much more seriously, and the numbers of people who actually listen to this obvious advice is underwhelming and tragic. If you absolutely refuse to write then watch documentaries that are outside your comfort zone and subscribe to some mental health podcasts. Cooking shows and escapist novels don’t count unless you are actually going to make the friggen recipes. Oprah and Deepak and Tony Robbins are not really philosophers, in spite of their witting aphorisms, and can only take you so far. They are paid millions to peddle philosophic pablum and that’s fine, but it’s not really the same as studying your life. Don’t get me started on Oprah Winfrey.

We don’t have the luxury anymore of putting this stuff off until it’s too late. If you think you will just grow out of your anxiety or chronic depression or immaturity or naïveté you are literally the definition of that word. By the time people are adults we have a shitbarge of pain collecting in our subconscious and if you don’t do something about it, and I mean it, dammit, you are going to fall miles short of your potential. I’m talking about you Mr. Anger Problem. Deal with that stuff because you are ejaculating your attitude all over the rest of us and using anger to bully people. You passive-aggressives need to talk to someone who can hold you accountable for all that bullshit you are spreading. Just tell me what you want, for the love of god. I know you aren’t mad, you’re just disappointed that everyone seems to let you down but have you ever stopped to consider that being passive-aggressive is dysfunctional and everyone around you knows what you’re trying to do? Most of us can smell a PA a mile off and we talk about you behind your back. Use your words. Are you easily offended? The rest of us are on egg shells around you because we don’t know if or when you are going to pout and make a scene. Is that really how you want people to think of you?

If you are one of those people that constantly needs others to feel sorry for you, then I actually feel sorry for you. Grow the hell up. You have a hole in your heart that you are trying to stuff full with sad Facebook and IG posts that tell us you’re having a bad day (sad emoji) specifically so that we will all tell you that you’re awesome and we believe in you. Believe in yourself, you’re better than this. See someone and talk about your incessant need for approval because that crap is handcuffing your life.

Anger, passive-aggressive behaviour, taking offence, acting pathetic, they’re all about power and control. These dysfunctional handholds keep us immature and miserable. These are learned coping mechanisms that you developed when you were a kid or after an abusive relationship and they may have worked at one time but they are handholds that are holding you back. Wouldn’t you rather be happy?

We all need better handholds. If you spend your whole life trying to be pretty and petty you are going to end up dumb and bitter. Don’t be dumb. Spend 3 years working on your anxiety every day. Don’t lie down and give in. Get serious about your anger problem and get control of your emotions. Work on that crappy impulse control until you can win. Seriously. This stuff is very hard and the percentage of people who die happy is lower than we want to admit. You are worth it. Say it. I am worth it.

Stop trusting in other people to make you happy, Scott. Stop being decimated when our cultural icons turn out to be rapists. Everyone is going to let you down, that’s called life. Everyone is petty and selfish and a little bit broken so get over it. You’re right, people are stupid. Some people think the actors on CSI can act. Don’t be one of those people, pick up a book or listen to an audiobook or an intelligent podcast or documentary and learn a little psychology. Talk to someone about philosophy. Don’t be dumb.

I don’t care what you say, CSI sucks.

Your Selfies Make Me Hate You

Published on August 29, 2018February 20, 2019 by Scott Williams2 Comments

I do this regular gig in concert with Dawn Taylor. This week again we were hard at the conversation and she mentioned that it is common for high schoolers in her world to take hundreds of selfies every day. Every day. If you are one of those who is prone to the lens, with pouting lips and that one leg in front of the other to prop up your boobs and make you look thinner, you may have issues. That’s right, I’m talking about you Steve. We all know you are beautiful and you don’t need to point it out. You have it going on, baby, you’re perfect just the way you are. Shine girl.

I have a couple of friends who post selfies about stages of their life, or every once in while when they feel like it. I’m not talking to you. Hundreds. Fake accounts to try out 350 selfies, a panacea of self-indulgent spam all designed to see which pouty face plays best with a test audience.

Psychology geeks tend to look at life through a particular lens, and if you ask for my professional opinion the selfie thing is far more telling than the average low-grade narcissist may realize. There definitely, absolutely positively is an insane relationship between people who constantly take selfies and words like narcissism and insecurity and trauma. Your incessant need to show other people how you look and love and live (gag) throws up huge red flags to the people around you who are, and I say this lovingly, sick of you posting selfies all the time in your unreal world of stunted happiness.

I’m coming on a little strong because we promised we would, and so the question for all of us is, in light of our addictions to our phones and our media, how self-absorbed do we want to become? Once the sex robots are sold on Amazon it’s going to be difficult to get anyone to listen for a decade, so we need to figure this out now. Our virtual existence allows us increasingly to confirm those neurotransmitters that are in the process of hardwiring humanities next phase of existence. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (who incidentally wouldn’t know a thing about this topic so why do you care about their opinion) to know that we are blindly marching into the i-Store, blissfully yet unaware of the effects of such catastrophic technological and cultural changes on our perceptions of reality, and that’s not even mentioning the effect of lassoing our wills to our technology (and that phone I panic over when I forget it at a restaurant).

If you are having a crippling struggle with insecurity please talk to someone. If you are feeling a little bit narcissisty it is important for you and the people you love to have an accurate barometer for your behaviour. Recognize you have a problem and deal with it. The real reason that many people do not move beyond their defining dysfunction is because it’s damn hard and takes years. Most people don’t change because it’s too much work with little interim reward. We’re all insecure but if it is affecting your life to such a degree that you need validation from anonymous stranger-friends in the virtual world than recognize you have an issue and do something about it. You’re better than that, at least for now, and you don’t need 120 pictures of your blowfish lips to prove it. Let’s just say it – you’re definitely getting uglier the older you get, so lets all just deal with it and agree to keep lying to each other until it doesn’t matter anymore.

Which brings us to the point of this rant – it is my absolute belief that the secret of life (for me) is caring less what people who don’t matter think about me. I’ve had people who alleged they were my friends say atrocious things to my face and behind my back, and Counsellor Scott has worked this through and screw you. I’m good. I remember the first time someone slammed me hard on the internet, before I understood about trolls. It hurt my feelings. I’m a Canadian so I was looking for something much more passive-aggressive. My goal is to care less, not more, about the opinions of people who did not have my best interests at heart.

I’m fairly certain that someday that negative stuff sets in for good. Old people that complain all the time and middle-aged folks who are angry at the government and can find fault in any kind of happiness. Older adults that are still cripplingly anxious, talking about drivel that is mind-numbingly boring. Just kill me. Then again, some of us have grown up as entitled little prima donnas and honestly believe we are inherently better than other people. That stuff infects your soul. The beautiful people have other problems that I mostly don’t care about. You’re privileged, deal with it. Next.

Trauma is also on that list, to the surprise of some. People who are vapidly self-absorbed, who contort their body for 100 pictures at a time, have occasionally been through situations and realities that have scarred them and left them feeling hungry for approval and ultimately love. Terrible experiences can scar you in the most unusual ways. Maybe you were beaten or raped or violated in one of a hundred sick scenarios, anytime from a couple of months before you were born until you graduated from pre-school. Maybe your time came later. Broken hearts and bruised cheeks and someone telling you that you will always be a loser. The older I get the more ways I learn how we can hurt. Sleep issues, mood swings, panic attacks, problems with sustaining relationships of any kind, hyper-vigilence, difficulty with change or addiction to it, even attraction to the bad boy/girl can be an aftershock of getting the shit kicked out of you by your ex or hanging out with that creepy uncle. Some survivors have difficulty sticking with romantic relationships and are control freaks and obsess about how clean the kitchen counter is.

Reason #293 why psychology is cool.

Ask yourself, how often do I look at my body or obsess about a flaw or a judgment from someone whose opinion shouldn’t matter? How important are your looks, really really? I’m sorry I had to be the one to break it to you but no one cares this much about what your truck looks like when it’s dirty, it’s a truck. I’ve never dreamed about your truck. Stop posting pictures of the truck. Now you’ve done it, you have me in a loop. Truck.

No one cares if you are shopping. No one wants to see 24 pictures of you getting your stupid hair done. Give us one good picture of you and your bestie in front of the Great Wall of China and don’t stand in the way of the wall. You can post pictures from The Louvre or your skydiving adventure all day, but I can only absorb a limited number of pictures of you on a beach in the Caribbean before I begin to wish you ill will. One is nice, 50 pictures of you having fun makes me think you are rubbing my nose in it. And last, but certainly most gross, a few of you need to know that you’re making some of your friends horny and none of us wants to have to bring up that topic without tequila. Stop making us horny.

This is what I’m trying to learn – who cares what people think about me. If you are one of my chosen people than every concern you have is a valid one, but if I’m rarely or ever going to see that person again who the hell cares if they approve of me or not. You can’t be trolled on social media if you refuse to care about what anonymous idiots think of you or your work. Internet comments cannot hurt you unless you let them. I need to grow wise and kind and all that crap, I get it, but who really cares what a stranger thinks about me? Why oh why would I give a flying flip what some anonymous detractor or false friend thinks about my life or my behaviour? I have high quality friends who take delight in taking me down a peg, so why would I care what that person said about me on Facebook or to a friend of a friend of a friend of mine?

So think about this need to self-obsess. Some of us are spending way too much time getting our self esteem from our meat sack. Many of us are completely obsessed with our feelings and our hurts and our massive insecurities. I say this with no judgment, go get some help before its too late and you become that ugly version of yourself and die bitter.

Getting Older – Late Night Random Sarcastic Ramblings

Published on July 28, 2018July 29, 2018 by Scott Williams2 Comments

My wife is trying to explain to me the difference between face cream and body cream. You have got to be kidding me. I couldn’t tell the difference between face cream and bear fat if you got the actual bear to fat all over me. Apparently there is a hand cream as well. Come on people, our ancestors are pretending they don’t know us right now. People used to pour on whale blubber and now there is 453 kinds of hand cream, or face cream, how would I know the freaking difference?

I like that orange smelling stuff because I’m a complex contemporary man and it makes me smell yummy. I don’t know what body part I’m supposed to get the cream for, so I’m just going to ask for the orange stuff. It’s like that sexist joke about women who, when asked what kind of car it was, said it was yellow. People who know their oils are looking at me like car salesmen, shaking their head. I grew up in the 70’s, we had vaseline.

It’s my birthday today. By the time you read this it won’t be my birthday anymore so you don’t have to do the obligatory “Happy Birthday!!” (gag). There isn’t a cream on the market for what I have going on. Getting older may be easier for some but I’ve rarely been accused of being “some”. I’m more about fighting reality to the bitter end, pretending I’m still cool while rocking that pulled up white socks and sandal combination and eating at 3 pm. Sexy. I’ll be that weirdo in his 80’s asking my kids what clothes I should buy without realizing they are talking on behalf of 60 year olds. Time to take a loan out on some Birkenstocks.

Getting older sucks. On most days I’ll fling you as many platitudes as you can stomach about living your life to the full but tonight, not so much. I’m only asking that one of you takes me aside the first time I think wearing socks with sandals is cool and gives me the old 5-iron to the temple. And what is up with that pants pulled up to the nipples thing? I saw a guy in his 50’s with a mullet the other day, sporting a speedo. Middle-aged women wearing that blouse with the pirate ruffles and flower pattern, talking about yogurt and their crappy marriages while carrying that annoying water bottle because it’s 11 feet to the nearest hydration source.

Thankfully you aren’t forced to grow up. I disappointed some family members recently when I announced that I plan on not getting any more mature. I’ve peaked. You can imagine how supportive they were. I refuse to stop using sarcasm and bad jokes and comic books. I could care less about 90% of the tripe that middle-aged people talk about, and I won’t be watching NCIS anytime soon. Milkshakes and candy and chocolate (this is the part you quote after I die of Diabetes). Life is getting shorter all the time and I can’t believe how many people spend their precious moments endlessly complaining about pretty much everything. Counsellor Scott can listen to you all day, but if we’re friends and we’re out kayaking you better not spend the entire time complaining about your spouse or I’m going to start fantasizing about drowning you. Living your life as a bitter old citizen may be fine for some people but I’m not dead yet. I’d rather talk about philosophy and good beer and amazing stories. I want to jam and travel and experience.

I might even skydive again.

My Depression

Published on July 25, 2018August 29, 2018 by Scott Williams1 Comment

It is tempting as a therapist to talk about mental health stuff like it’s a science and we’re in a classroom. People want to hear what their counselor says, right? I have all kinds of relevant articles and YouTube videos we can watch in my office. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of files with enough advice in them to keep you busy for a few lifetimes.

The longer I do this the less I believe in good information helping people change their fundamental personality. If you haven’t had real depression I’m not entirely sure you understand what is truly going on. I wish I was not saying that you can’t really speak intelligently about this topic without practice but nobody is asking me to describe how it feels to have a baby. Cancer patients want to talk to cancer survivors who understand the hell that they and their family are experiencing. Addicts understand addiction on a different level than my wife who grew up as a pentecostal and still hasn’t really consumed alcohol on any level that could result in sloppy sex. You don’t need to be an addict to counsel an addict because counselors know a great deal about poor impulse control and craving for sex or acceptance or meth. Addiction is more about trauma than what your vehicle of choice is. People self-medicate with hundreds of things, not just drugs or booze or sex.

I rarely talk about this publicly on any meaningful level but I had a pretty decent run with depression. My world fell apart and I lacked the coping skills to pull myself out of it, and at least a bit of the reason that I still do this for a living is because of the lessons I learned in the valley of the shadow of death.

I was very depressed for a significant period of time. It became a way of life, the fog that defined my existence. People who know me from that time are not traditionally my friends at this stage of my life, and the few who stuck around don’t need a memory cue about that Scott Williams. It’s been enough time that I can disconnect from that sad little clown, and looking now from a bit of distance he was a pretty hurting unit. So ya, like many who have come before me I fell into a life of depression for a serious piece of my story and I still remember how crazy that bastard was. Depression can gut you. It can take away everything and everyone you love and make your life a crawling waste. There were times when I was so broken that I put myself at the risk of personal harm, and months of such emotional abandonment that I didn’t care if I lived or died and didn’t care that I didn’t care.

I have apologized to my boys countless times but I still carry the stain.

There are people who come to me believing they are depressed because they are deeply sad or grieving or crying every day before work. That may be a form of depression or dysthymia but people who have gone full freaktown deep-dive depression often describe it as feeling nothing at all, not caring or hoping or functionally coping. Meaninglessness and pain and hopelessness. It got dark and nasty for a bigger chunk of time than I can admit to myself and if it wasn’t for Celexa, a few good friends, and the responsibility to solo parent two hurting kids I may not have made it out sane. Days and months and minute after minute after damned minute of despair and depressed thoughts and music that makes you want to hurt kittens. Some of you out there know how slow time can go when every minute of the day is more disappointing than before but you really don’t give enough of a crap to feel anything beyond your own pathetic non-existence.

No one wants to hear it, btw. In the insanity of those days it was a testimony to how messed up I was that I honestly believed other people wanted to hear my litany of pain and woe. News flash 2001 Scott – people don’t want to hear it. If you are a pessimist who is prone to complain to your spouse or friends I need to tell you in love that no one wants to hear you constantly complain. I take that back, there are other complainers who love to talk about that garbage for hours but most of us are far too attention deficit to listen to you talk about your stupid stupid problems that you refuse to deal with year after year after year. We get it, some people need to complain in order to release that bad karma and that is a real thing and I get it. Still. Do yourself a favour and find another miserable friend, someone who shares your interests.

As a counselor, I can tell you that depression is one of the hardest mental health challenges to overcome without time and some decent help along the way. There is no quick fix for such a crippling and insidious illness, and people who tell you to just jog it off or read this or that book or blog (and you will be jim dandy!) are full of crap. It takes months of dedicated work before you even feel like doing anything beyond Netflix and licorice and how do you get motivated to tackle this monster when you can’t even get motivated enough to get motivated? There is nothing I can say to you today, if you are in the valley of the shadow of death, that will pull you out of that funk.

I’m not implying, however, that you should give up or stop reaching out. It all felt meaningless to me for a very long time but sitting on the couch watching daytime television was not the balm it was advertised to be. Moving forward in depression is exhausting but there eventually came a time when I actually didn’t have a bad day. First I would take a few minutes off from my feelings, then a few more. One day I didn’t self-indulge for an entire hour, then a morning, then eventually a day. There was no magic ticket or special medication that pulled me back from the precipice but only a series of little things and a couple of amazing kids and friends who never gave up on me. I started listening to audiobooks between tears, then comic books. I ate real food again and got out of bed before the crushing mind games could pull me under the covers. I went out, even though I hated every minute of it.

In those dark days, I was convinced that this was my forever. I look back and am thankful that I never jumped off that bridge. The only advice I give people who are battling with serious depression is – stay alive. Talk to someone who understands. And get out of bed.

The Part Of Addiction No One Is Talking About

Published on July 23, 2018July 23, 2018 by Scott Williams3 Comments

As a clinician who works largely with addictions and the intersection of trauma and life, I get to be on the front-lines in a seemingly unending parade of adventure and experience. I picked up a heroin/fentanyl rig from our bathroom this afternoon. I walked around in the blue gloves offering prostate exams but for some reason there were no takers. Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my partner in crime, Dawn Taylor, consulting on one of the most complex cases you could imagine. That day began with an RCMP corporal at the homeless shelter, someone had procured a video projector, probably from the same inexhaustible storehouse where all those nice bikes come from.

Addiction is a complex and fascinating issue, if you can somehow remove the never-ending cacophony of tragedy and loss. It has taken me years of full-time employment to come to understand just a small part of this complicated thing, even with it so present in my own history. The information we all read in the media, in what we assume are serious articles written by addiction experts, is ofttimes laughable. This week I read again, for the 400th time, about the debate whether or not marijuana is addictive. I dare you to say it is, or it’s not, or have no opinion at all – it won’t matter, you’ll still be called an idiot. The misinformation and self-delusion from both sides of the McInformation Universe make it next to impossible for the average Normie to retain any level of informed dialogue. Is marijuana addictive?

Please…

So much of what passes for real information is the reality television version of reality. These same websites and professionals are often completely unfamiliar with the subculture they are lecturing. Just because you have a Ph.D. and get to charge thousands of dollars because you are the flavour of the month doesn’t necessarily guarantee you know what the hell you are talking about.

Being a stoner is to be a part of a community, of sorts. This subculture brings it’s own rules and mores and values which are impossible to truly understand from the outside, much like the priest who is giving marriage advice. I am not saying that addictions counsellors who have not been druggies have a lesser understanding and therefore are less effective. So much of what we do in the counselling room has little or nothing to do with your drug of choice. Impulse control, trauma, and mental health are all universal issues.

It doesn’t take an addict to help an addict but it does take one to understand how funny it is that we managed to convince you that the only reason we wanted medicinal marijuana was for the physical pain. I studied the outlet across the street from my addictions office for 6 months and you would be impressed by the number of Ford F-150’s that represent at 4:05 pm on a weekday, driven by two dudes straight off the construction site who jog across the street to the store. The last time I was in there the owner offered me a “pull” from her vape, but I’m guessing that was for the pain that she inherently recognized in my burdened soul because weed gives you wings. You can send me angry emails until the cows come home but it won’t change the fact that my job entails knowing how to separate the truth from bullshit. I have clients who use medical forms of cannabis and understand the difference between CBD and THC and aren’t really interested in being baked all day; and I’ve seen dozens of clients who show me their Medical Marijuana Card and we have a good laugh. It’s all going to be a mute point on October 17, except that now a whole bunch of us have decided to try it out, now that it’s legal. I polled several rooms in the past couple of months and that’s a real thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I barely care anymore, it’s just a reality in my world. This article is not about the evils or benefits of weed, so don’t go off on me. Dawn Taylor and I have an entire upcoming podcast on pot coming this winter that is guarenteed to upset a few of you, so hold on. (Yes we are launching a podcast this winter called “Reality Therapy” with the tagline “Welcome To The Argument”).

I set out to write an article about how difficult it is to leave the life, even when you want to quit and it’s clearly time to move on. As usual, I meandered a little. All this diatribe was leading to the realization that quitting the self-medication game is a lot harder than most people think, and all too often that addictive personality thing we’ve all heard about is more a learned behaviour than a genetic one. Your dad may have been an alcoholic, and that may be why you think you want a drink right now, but it’s also possible that when you were a preschooler you watched your father self-medicate his tragic life and that taught you a little something. Perhaps your parent was addicted to rageahol, and you figured out that it’s way easier to check out than hang in. There are literally hundreds, nay thousands of ways we have learned to cope with childhood trauma or a controlling parent or that uncle who liked to touch you. You were the fat kid, or your complexion was a mess, or you were too shy to be the popular kid in school.

Name your poison.

Years of continuous drug use will create neural pathways hardwired to thirst for “altered”. Most drug users have difficulty imagining a world where they could not be buzzed, the real world can be incredibly boring or painful or confusing. I’ve watched hundreds of clients wrestle with the reality that they will never really get that monkey off their backs because they’ve been doing this for so long that they’re probably going to have that little primate in the back of their mind for the rest of their life.

I haven’t used cocaine in 25 years but that doesn’t mean I would sit in a locked room with a line of coke, if I knew no one would ever find out. Besides that, I may not jones for blow, but there is always something vying for my attention, and not always something good. People self-medicate with booze or shoes, chocolate or masturbation or video games – the delivery system seems less and less important the longer I do this. I could tell you stories of people who’s lips were raw because they ate 4 bags of sunflower seeds a day in an effort to placate the persistent hunger for meth or crack or because their anxiety is raging and it’s the closest thing at hand. People are clean for 15 years than they “go back out”, god only knows why. It might have something to do with the fact that you quit your drug of choice but never moved beyond that need to feel good even if it might feel bad after you come down from that sugar rush. I don’t usually tell clients that happy little factoid on our first visit together.

And let’s be honest, it’s not just the “junkies” we’re talking about. You went to that doctor after you hurt yourself and 6 weeks later you had a very hard time when your prescription for Percocet ran out. Addiction is easy because drugs really are as good as people think they are… for a while. I’m sorry but your youth group has a hard time competing with the spiritual orgasm that Dexedrine can deliver. If I’m completely honest with myself I’d love to get buzzed, some days.

Addicts have the best of intentions when they quit using. You might be surprised at how honest and kind and sincere a person can become when they are in The Program. Many sufferers are able to clench down and sweat it out, but that whole piece about being a normie for the rest of my life was harder to accept on an emotional level than I could have ever imagined. The rest of your life completely sober doesn’t sound as sexy as being blitzed on shrooms with good friends this Friday night. The relentless normal is difficult for some people to handle, week after week, and it isn’t long before recovering addicts often feel the claws come out from their backpack of chimps (I know, chimps are not monkeys; I ran out of snappy monkey references).

I have been told, more times than I can remember, how much harder it was to leave the life than the drug. As the sarcastic quip goes, quitting is easy, people often do it several times a week. Staying sober when all that stuff you ignored when you were high comes back calling, and you have no way to self-medicate because that group said you had to be completely clean, now that’s not so easy. This sounds allot like the ending of Goodfellas but I can’t help it, it’s a powerful and persuasive subculture. As Henry Hill said in that movie after he was placed in Protective Custody:

“See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life. And we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all, just for the asking. Our wives, mothers, kids, everybody rode along. I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed…Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I’d bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I’d either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. Didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke I would go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over. And that’s the hardest part. Today, everything is different. There’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. Can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
Henry Hill

Leaving the party to become a citizen often feels like it is going to suck. All you have to do is change your everything. It’s way easier to just give up and slowly succumb, in spite of that false narrative you keep telling yourself, the one where you don’t end up in my office.

The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death

Published on July 5, 2018 by Scott Williams2 Comments

For you. We talked about this.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Psalm 23:4

I have seen darkness in people which defies comprehension. We’ve talked about this before. There is a time in many journeys when our lives completely break. Type “swerve” into my search bar to find out more. or “The Event”.

Most of us grew up believing our lives would somehow turn out just fine. The weight of the truth can be devastating, at first. We are shocked when the ugly truths sink in.

Not many people walk through my door because they want to. Reality has punched us in the face and it stings. Few of us imagined we would have a lifelong battle with anxiety or depression or the fact that your Uncle Tom was the tomcat people…

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To my close relative: Why Aliens Probably Didn’t Help Build The Pyramids.

Published on July 1, 2018July 1, 2018 by Scott WilliamsLeave a comment

I love you, you know that. I believe in Santa and life on other planets (likely), and that Bucky is the best superhero (they turned the nicest guy in the world into a killing machine who is best friends with the other nicest guy in the world. It writes itself).

I want to believe in fairytale endings and the fable that there really is justice in this life, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that aliens helped people, smart people, build stupid triangles. Sure some people who live in trailer courts where it’s very warm outside have been allegedly violated by curious martians, but that still doesn’t constitute a double-blind study, and these stories are often reported by people who believe the world is flat and vaccines give you autism. Sure the moon landing could have been faked (no it wasn’t). It’s entirely possible that the Illuminati is dictating the global agenda, except that it isn’t. Ok, I got a little distracted there. I know you don’t believe all those things but I was on a run.

There is, to our limited understanding, something profound about sentience. You can see it in your pet dog, in the playfulness of an otter, the intrigue of a dolphin. Life itself struggles to understand,. Thinking beings are curious. The very essence of intelligence is the need to know. I’ve watched Star Trek so I know that travellers among the stars would want to put on local outfits and bring their tricorders down for a good look. Aliens would seek interaction. Why would anything spend all that money, all that time to make first contact, and then be so easily satisfied with rednecks and bad television? I know I read comics so my opinions seem slightly less credible, but there isn’t a ton of rigorous debate among smart people, just those conspiracy freaks on the History Channel. Aliens probably do not walk among us.

And alas, my love, I could mention the sciency stuff. I’m sorry if you call it “geek time” but our lively little ball of blue is in the middle of nowhere, and there are a trillion stars in our galaxy. And there are trillions of galaxies. You are probably right about life on other planets but, and I don’t mean to sound condescending because I barely know what I’m talking about, the universe is ridiculously big; so big that it’s impossible for my little brain to even imagine.

Things are so far away. I hope like heck that there are sentient beings out there somewhere, but the length of time since the beginning of time has been finite, and it took our earth billions of years and a few thousand lucky accidents to produce a Big Mac. The thought that there are other beings looking through telescopes somewhere is a dream that I too want to believe. It seems entirely possible that of the thousands and perhaps millions of planets that could sustain life that there is at least one or two other cosmic accidents like us. Many scientists desperately want Einstein to be wrong about those weird equations like E=MC2, but we still haven’t broken the speed of light and so trips around the universe are nothing like in Firefly. And don’t even talk to me about quantum entanglement if you have a hard time buying the moon landing.

Our planet is 100,000 years away from our closest goldilocks neighbour, and you’re just getting started. It will, unfortunately, take you millions of years to reach anything of note after you pass that solitary planet. They would need faster then light speed travel (maybe that gets easier to imagine the faster science speeds up, you have me there). Yes there are scientists who postulate that Einstein’s theory of wormholes is how aliens travel to other groovy Star Trek galaxies, but their technology would have to be so utterly beyond our understanding and we still can’t even prove wormholes exist in any pragmatic sense.

Sadly there is little evidence that those hillbillies were anally probed by real aliens. But that’s not really what I’m writing about, it’s just fun to argue.

I admire your curiosity. There is something in all of us that wants to believe that there is something out there. When I look at the stars at night, the vastness and wonder of space can give me literal goose bumps. One of my great regrets is that I never bought an expensive telescope. I love the stars. Believe it or not I actually hosted an astronomy show with my good buddy Bill in Fort McMurray. Bill went on to adventure and fortune and I’m sitting on the couch at home wondering what I’ve done with my life.

Curiosity is the point of the story. The same curiosity that drives you to wonder at the pyramids and dream big dreams of ancient worlds is what I believe any sentient being would automatically possess. An evolutionary desire to make sense out of your world has to be a prerequisite for someone who can build a spaceship and drive carefully beyond the speed of light; at the very least know how to fly through a wormhole, which probably exists. Anything that is alive is confronted with a panoply of decisions that literally mean the difference between life and death. The universe is oblivious to the needs of an alien from the planet Zork, and the very act of existence is a struggle to survive. That skillset necessitates decision-making, which depends on the ability to discern choices. Creatures who develop the capacity for intuition are obviously much better suited for survival, and evolution has a way of sorting that out. Intuition is very close to curiosity.

I’m sorry but there is a chance you may be wrong about the pyramid thing. In spite of media culture the evidence really isn’t there, and there is a chance that that short dude with hair that sticks straight up on The History Channel is doing is for the fame because no real scientist in the world believes that crap. The weight of evidence isn’t even a close fight; the Flat Earth people seem to be taking over the world but that is only YouTube and the evidence is overwhelmingly in.

I love how you have such a good mind. There is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to believe we have been visited. There is nothing wrong with faith in things we can’t prove in a laboratory. Mystery is essential to my life and I don’t believe in a world where all the evidence is really in. You are bright and are right about so many things I barely understand. As cliche as it may sound I want to honour your journey as we try to figure this out together.

But not this. Aliens didn’t build the pyramids. I love you.

What Hockey Taught Me About Life

Published on February 24, 2018February 24, 2018 by Scott Williams5 Comments

I am a Canadian and for the most part, many of the stereotypes are true. Most of my friends say ‘eh’ and we do love hockey. I don’t watch it, many of us don’t. But put an ice rink in the middle of your block and someone will show up with beer to watch or play hockey. We will shine our headlights on the ice and let your stupid little sister play, although we had agreed that today was going to be a serious game.

As I said, I don’t watch hockey. I do not watch many sports outside the Olympics, and I watch The Olympics because I am a Canadian and that’s what we do. I love watching volleyball and pole vaulting, luge and Big Air, but nothing defines our nation like the game of hockey. Watching the Canada-USA game is a religious belief system here, and we have the best women’s hockey team in the world. Our men don’t do too poorly, either.

You can find a Maple Leafs fan anywhere, and they aren’t even any good. Sidney Crosby is a national hero. The 80’s Edmonton Oilers ruled the earth, and the highlights of the 1972 Canada-Russia Series still plays well on national television. My dad drove me into the city at 5:15 on a Saturday morning to play A-Team hockey when he literally had three jobs and three little kids. Canadian parents are used to sitting on cold benches, clad in team colours, with a thermos and box of oranges somewhere. Even those of us who put our kids in soccer and T-ball have driven to a rink to watch a relative or friend’s kid skate on the ice. I am Canadian. We made a beer commercial a cultural icon. Most of us say sorry more than we should. We define ourself but what we are (not American, socially conscious, more vain about our freedoms than we let on) and by what we are not (we are not American). We are Europe’s exotic and homespun little sister.

What some foreigners may not know, however, is that ice hockey was only part of the game. Street hockey is a revered Canadian pastime and most of us old-timers still have a street stick somewhere down in the basement. I played 2-on-2 on my boulevard for almost the entirety of my youth. Drive down any block on a warm summer afternoon in Canada and almost assuredly you will run into some kids pulling those iconic red hockey nets to the side of the road. We love hockey.

From the outside, hockey looks like a semi-violent and occasionally phallic warrior sport, but that’s only half the story. When you are floating on that fairytale surface with a puck on your stick, and you feel the blood pumping as you pass the defenceman, you can actually feel your comrade on the other side of the ice. Hockey is the ultimate team sport, where you are shamed if you do not pass the glory on to your teammate and trust that you are both completely in the moment together. It may not be Band of Brothers, but there is no denying the palpable intimacy of intention between the players on every hockey team.

It didn’t even matter if I was the one who scored. The glory of setting up a goal was considered a heroic act, applauded by the masses. Winning a hockey game is about talent and grit, but it is also about camaraderie and harmony and the depth of human connection. There are people all over Canada and beyond that I have scored a goal with, set-up a perfect spike with, done battle together on some field or pitch; and in many of those moments we shared connection that I don’t always get in traffic on a Friday night.

Hockey is volleyball on steroids. It may have something to do with how amazing the experience of skating really is. Hockey players glide, they fly, and the beauty of skating with a puck and a friend is not so distant from the sense of freedom that I have felt skydiving; it is poetic and sensual; it’s ice on your blades, hot cocoa on your breath, and stories of glory all the way home. It is bragging to your mom or dad while they rubbed your toes until you could feel them again. My dad used to take me for a frosted mug of A&W Root Beer on the way home after every home game. That’s Canada.

But again, this is only part of the story. Hockey is also about team. It is about ideals like sharing, and the belief that we could trust a brother or sister in a time of turmoil, while the enemy is in your end and time is running out. Hockey is our social religion, along with back bacon and John Candy and Michael J. Fox. Hockey is about heritage and hot chocolate and feeling like a real community; the deep cultural understanding that ‘we’ is always better than ‘me’. It is intimate and brave and built on the understanding that we will both believe in the same dream.

Can you believe the Americans beat us this year?

Dating After You Break-up: Why No One Ever Listens

Published on November 24, 2017February 20, 2019 by Scott Williams22 Comments

This conversation is a part of my world, almost every week. People who are breaking up often wander into my office, and inevitably it comes down to the conversation that no one who is freshly single really wants to investigate too thoroughly, with someone as brutally honest as yours truly. When you are in my clutches I do not filter. Ever. Any of you who have worked with me are welcome to share your stories in the comments section.

Some counsellors will ask you “and how does that make you feel”. Every class in Master’s level psychology assumes the role of a counsellor to be that of empathetic and boring mirror, paid to help you realize you already know the answer deep inside your precious heart. I don’t do that. I’m getting older and I’m sick and tired of pretending I’m normal so clients either like the process of they see someone else. This sounds like the height of arrogance but I’m wearing my counsellor hat as I write this and some of you know what I mean. I’m not filtering for my ego as I write this.

It works for some people. People do not pay me to play with my gloves on, and it was never my wheelhouse to begin with. Those who continue to let me buy them coffee are a particular bunch. I am not for everyone. That comes off as self-glorifying but I mean this, and those of you who know me know what is coming next, I mean this in a purely “Counsellor Scott” kind of way. Normal dude Scott would not usually invade your space so fully, I am even shy in some social settings. Counsellor Scott can be a dick. Counsellor Scott, when working with teens, is just plain weird.

There are times in life when it is important to have someone who isn’t afraid to pull off the bandaid of your subjective reality, someone who won’t judge you. Practitioners in my field are all about that liberal mushy crap. When people tell their psychologist, “here’s something you haven’t heard before” they really don’t know what society’s secular priests hear on a daily basis. We are paid to hear your worst nightmare.

As usual, I just went on a tangent. Back to our original conversation. Let me set this up for you.

You come to my office, and you’ve been separated for 2-5 months. You’ve met someone, and nothing has happened, but you are definitely getting ready to rumble. In every single one of these conversations people, hundreds of people, eventually get around to the question we’ve all been waiting for – Is it too early for me to date?

I’ll save you a ton of words and tell you that the end of this paragraph is going to end with the words “damn straight”. With few exceptions, it is too early. There are exceptions (to literally repeat what I just said but in a way that tells you I’m about the say the exact opposite) but that only reinforces the truth. Ending a relationship that has been your whole world for 10 or 25 years has profound emotional consequences, though those consequences differ wildly depending on if you are the leave-r or the leave-e. That’s an entire article on its own. Any of my colleagues can tell you that people are far less objective in those first months, and yes, years than they believe at the time. Damn straight.

When my life fell apart I was categorically insane. Leaving a relationship messes with your mind, and your body. Moving in with someone, or throwing your heart at Mr. Fabulous No-faults, is typically a faulty decision, and I believe I have the data to back that up. Simply put, time heals and you are almost always more deluded about yourself when you are in crisis than you want to believe. Don’t do it.

This article is not called Great Advice That All My Clients Follow. The simple truth is that in all my years doing this gig I can probably count on half a hand the people who have followed that choice little piece of advice. Chime in here clinicians, we have seen thousands of patients who have been psychologically traumatized by the death of a dream dive into the heady world of romance and infatuation because, and this is the real story, nothing temporarily heals a broken heart like someone who wants to touch you in fun places and tells you that you are one in a million. Isn’t that the best thing in life?

There are dozens of reasons I could give you, but it almost never matters. Vulnerable people are just that, vulnerable. They are prone to impulsivity, eager to fill those holes in their hearts, indescribably susceptible to unhealthy relationships and emotions in a barren wasteland that has been their lives.

Here’s another hurtful tidbit. Sick attracts sick. Do you really want to attract someone who is as vulnerable, as recently broken, as emotionally dysfunctional, as you are? Healthy people are far less likely to date a deeply troubled and needy trauma victim than you might think. Take what is likely the most important decision of your life then rip your heart apart and mess with your feelings and cognition and grief and a hundred other painful words. Now go ahead and make the most weighted decision you will ever need to make. Don’t forget to mix in a bunch of broken relationships and hurt feelings and angry relatives. Add the incredible stress and poop storm that every break-up brings, those added bonuses called lawyers and fights about money and selling your house and kissing off half your friend. Recipe for a fruit salad.

When you look at this from the outside it’s a no-brainer.

But it doesn’t really matter, you won’t listen anyway. It’s not your fault, blame your neurochemistry. Those tortured neurons that you depleted for months and years are starving for some love, and you deserve to think of your own needs for once. How many of us have spent years without real intimacy and can barely imagine being in lust again. Bring on the dopamine.

You really do deserve to think of your own needs for once, and the best way you can do that is to spend that time with yourself, sans another person upon whom to focus your substantial energy. There are lessons that I learned single which are not available to those who move from relationship to relationship. I can just hear some of you saying right now, “I’ve always been in a relationship. I can’t be alone”. Deal with it. This is the route back to emotional wholeness. Spending time alone will teach you lessons you simply cannot learn when you are emotionally attached to someone you are attracted to. This is not really my opinion, it’s common knowledge that we all agree to in theory but have difficulty employing when we are horny.

You are better than that. As Milne said, you are stronger than you know. You deserve the time it takes to remember what it was like to be autonomous. You do not need to be defined or dictated to by something outside yourself. As I have often said, as cheesy as it is, don’t date until you don’t need to. Refuse to fill that hole in your heart with the emotional succubus that is rebound love. Realize that your amygdala is firing like a cheesy western and ask someone who isn’t afraid of you to be brutally honest; and hear them out without interrupting. Don’t inflict the mess that is your life on to another hurting individual or, god forbid, a healthy person who doesn’t deserve your dysfunction. Simply put, you will be attracted to different traits when you are unhealthy than you will be when you know who you are and what you want out of life.

Take a year. There I said it. Give yourself the time you need to become a better you. This is an amazing opportunity to redefine your life, and taking on the baggage of another person is not what you really need right now. I don’t care if this person is special, do you have any idea how many times I have heard that garbage? How can you know what you want when you don’t even know who you are? And if you are into dating guys you need to know that you have a big and obvious energy right now that is going to attract the wrong kind of action. I’m sort of a guy and I can tell you, we’ll became anything you want us to be if there is a chance we can wake up in bed with you someday. Men on the make are pigs and nothing says open for business like an emotionally needy potential friend. I care about how you feel. Really. Your last partner didn’t really talk about their feelings? Well let me tell you, I could listen to you talk all night. People tell me I’m almost too sensitive, I just really want to connect with you on an emotional level. You buying this?

Enough ranting, I don’t really mean it that way. We all know what that loneliness feels like, even when you are with someone else. Who doesn’t want to ravish someone again, or be ravished? There are few things in life that compare to that wonderful time when you first fall in infatuation and call it love, and before you realize how much of a moron that person really is. Romance is intoxicating, bring it on.

You are more amazing than you know. Most of us are. We are prone to self-criticism and overly hard on ourselves, and making you feel like crap isn’t my schtick. At the end of the day you really are worth getting to know. Have some fun. Go on some dates if you must but don’t give your heart away. Make more time for friends and kids and eggnog lattes and go do something crazy. Buy a kayak or go skydiving or visit Romania, and spend your dopamine on things that will build your self confidence and heal your soul. Spend the time, you deserve it.

It’s Your Fault

Published on November 22, 2017November 22, 2017 by Scott Williams3 Comments

And Now For Something Completely Different.

Published on September 22, 2017September 20, 2017 by Scott Williams1 Comment

Leave No Path Untaken

Published on September 20, 2017September 20, 2017 by Scott WilliamsLeave a comment

“Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you’ll see the world
If I’m not mistaken…

Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure…

Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Most people aren’t really sure what they are getting themselves into, when they come talk with someone like me. What we do at that coffee shop, or while walking by the river, has little in common with what happens on television or Netflix. You are not Tony Soprano and I am not that horrible psychiatrist who sucked at counselling and committed ethical violations on an episodal level. You won’t spend the whole time complaining, and I am intrusive when it comes to the nitty gritty details. I get paid to act as a professional and you can go home and talk to your cat for hours about your medical problems or how much that person makes you mad at work. People want ideas and conversation and help, that’s why they make the appointment. Most counsellors are sedentary by nature and I am a screaming ball of ADHD and philosophy and other words that they offer at universities for those who don’t really want to earn much money or get their teeth cleaned on a regular basis.

Most of my clients have tried it their way, and life has a way of humbling the most stubborn of us every once in a while. I have written extensively about this topic and you can read about it here, here, here, or here. Moving forward in your life is usually more complicated in the real world, and we rarely get to live on Saturn or have a robot maid like on The Jetsons. Life is hard and they don’t post the rules on a website, and lets be honest, I usually did things the hard way because I’m naive and idealistic and not as self-aware as I thought at the time. For the love of god, don’t write your treatise in your 20’s. We shouldn’t have to review the reasons, this one is rock solid. I am startled at how dumb I was when I was 25. I’m not telling your story, I’m just speaking to those of us who have had to admit that we didn’t know what the crap we were talking about and some of those opinions we yelled so loudly, back when we knew everything, were utterly moronic.

At the risk of becoming a Hallmark Card, it really is true that most of us don’t live at our potential. I’m not talking about you.

I am working on another project or two with a few friends, and there is this feeling (and if you’ve had it you know what I’m talking about) at the beginning of a new adventure that is cocaine for me. The entire entertainment industry seems designed solely for the purpose of providing adventures which allow us to live lives in ways and places not connected to my grinding job or upset partner. We are neurologically wired for novelty. This has a profound impact on everything from our relationships to our addictions to our sexual satisfaction. I go to movies to be alive, but maybe it’s just me. When I am inside a great audiobook or an old fashioned paperback it triggers parts of my brain which include those yummy juices bouncing around in my neurons. Unlike many, I am blessed with primarily pleasant dreams, and I may be a child inside, but under countless moons I have been a secret agent or kung fu legend or somewhere warm drinking foofy drinks on a beach. I do this for a living and I know what living in a fantastical dream state suggests. The real world blows when it does.

Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure…

Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.

Here’s to you making that trip to Europe. A good one on those of ya who have decided to go back to school, or go on a road trip, or start to sculpture; just for the joy of getting your hands muddy. It is very easy to learn to play the bass… poorly. My wife just brought a 300 ton piano into our house, and her relentless pursuit of something that hard is inspiring (she doesn’t read my writing so I won’t get credit for that). In The Graveyard Book, Nobody Owens grew up in a graveyard, was adopted by ghosts, and mentored by a vampirish thing and a Hound Of God. With his life in danger, he was forced to spend the majority of his childhood playing with dead people, a witch, several nasty goblins, with only one friend who had a pulse and almost killed him, by accident of course. Those words, face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken, reminded Bod that his life was among the living, not the departed. It was his turn to have experiences and see oceans and taste coffee in faraway lands.

And how’s that working out for you?

That sounds so tiring, he said partly in jest. Life is ridiculously busy, and my freaking phone is becoming an addiction, and I dream of going to Kitts or a Balkan State or a castle in Scotland; but right now I’d settle for another hot day to float in my Canadian Tire pool. Everywhere I look, people complain about the pace of life in the 21st Century and the noise, noise, noise. It’s only 95 days until Christmas. See what I did there?

The good book says, without hope the people perish. Philosophers create theories to describe the meaning of life. Existential Psychoanalysis plays with creating meaning from meaning, or something nerdish like that. As Victor Frankl said, the person who has the why can bear almost any how. That sounds like a cheeseball meme until you find out the dude was in Auschwitz. Having a reason for staying alive another year is a powerful thing. Words like meaning and purpose, dreams, and hope, are powerful aphrodisiacs. Having that why makes this crappy how worth living.

…leave no path untaken.

Ear Hustle

Published on August 29, 2017August 29, 2017 by Scott Williams4 Comments

I like socks. Strange socks. People who don’t know what to get me at Christmas usually land on the weirdest socks they can find at EA Games. So when I found out there was a socks company that donated a pair of socks for every pair purchased, it had my attention. But that’s not even the cool part.

I started listening to some different podcasts today. I downloaded an app and the next thing I knew I was listening to Ear Hustle. It’s a podcast written, produced, and starring longterm inmates at San Quentin Prison. Honourable mention is given to Pelican Bay Supermax. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m interested in a lot of things, and Maximum Security Prisons are on the list. I have attended several prisons in various roles, and the psychology of the experiences that humans are subjected to in places like Pelican Bay is staggering. As a Canadian it is a surreal experience to watch your first documentary about American prisons. Our maximum security prisons are no joke, but what happens in the deep south is beyond most idealistic Canadian’s imagination. I knew a salesman who was sent to Pelican Bay for a very long time, and I imagine there are few humans who have had to endure the level of intensity such an experience would invoke. I have swapped prison stories for years with persons who have real world experience, and have spent an inordinate amount of energy asking questions about the gritty detail. So yes, the first podcast I happened upon was Ear Hustle.

It’s fantastic.

Here’s where the two stories connect. That sock company is called Bombas and they sponsor Ear Hustle. As an entrepreneur I can appreciate the subtle marketing potential of such an enterprise, but that pales in comparison to the good that one company can do if it tries. To date they have also donated 4,000,105 pairs of socks. No wait, 4,000,110. As Bombas points out, “Socks remain the #1 most requested clothing item at homeless shelters. So for every pair of Bombas you purchase, we donate a pair to someone in need. So far, you’ve made over four million small acts of human kindness possible. We can’t thank you enough.”

They aren’t quite weird enough for me, but that’s still very cool.

It really amazing what one company, or one person, can do when they decide to change the world. One of the best parts about my job is that I get to hear stories, thousands of stories, and many of them have a happy ending. I have known people who walked in the door so entirely messed up they were seemingly beyond the pale. They sat on the white couch or in my little office and fundamentally changed who they were, once they decided to step out. There are many ways to deal with your personal issues, and finding a greater purpose or learning about the meaning of your life may sound cliche, but few techniques can take you as far as a reason for living. Hundreds of people I have cared about have told me stories, tales of redemption and loss, staggering failures and unbelievable saves.

You might not think giving a pair of socks to some homeless dude is not your thing, but it’s a hell of a lot better than not giving out 4,000,000 pairs of socks to people who often have not felt the warmth of human kindness in some time. People and organizations that follow their hearts, and not just their wallets, genuinely feel better about their lives. Believing in something bigger than your worst moments is better than living a purely self-indulgent, puerile life that ends in meaninglessness, unless you’re a complete sheep (in which case you would not be reading this in the first place). This, unfortunately, compels me to remind you that no one wants to see another stupid picture of you on social media. We know what you look like, and it’s nothing like that doctored pic of you standing in a pose which is oddly reminiscent of what we imagine you would look like if there was something up your hiney. We’ve even talked about how mildly narcissistic that can become, so turn the camera around and show me a picture of nature, or culture, without your duck lips in the picture.

Liking a post on Facebook may give you warm fuzzies, but it’s the getting off your butt and living your life for something of value that will take you to the next level. Living in the moment is important, yes. So is mindfulness. So is having a reason to get up in the morning.

Get a life.

What Really Happens To That 10 Bucks You Gave That Homeless Dude At McDonalds.

Published on August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 by Scott Williams3 Comments

This story is not about how I feel politically about the growing homeless population in my local area. People who know me know that I never discuss local politics, and the only reason I look at anything in a political column is because of the craziness going on south of the border, and just over the land-bridge to Asia. What I’m about to say is controversial but I’m too inoculated to really care what trolls say in the comments section of blogs and articles. I won’t respond to your criticism unless it’s intelligent and not nasty, so let’s begin.

This is what really happens to that money you gave that poor guy who just needed to get enough money for a bus ticket to Chilliwack at the Mission 7-11 store. That dude has been trying to raise the money for a ticket for almost three years. That money went to buy methamphetamines. No, I am not saying that every homeless person is an addict, I’m not done yet. What I am clearly going to say is that in the part of the world where I live, every homeless person is afforded a minimal stipend, on a monthly basis, and there are at least three agencies feeding them. In the town I work in we will literally house everyone who really wants a place to live. Everyone. Canada is a socialized culture and agencies like the one I work at are given money from the local and provincial government to help people who want help. That last phrase was very important and we may return to it later.

Today I was getting propane for my BBQ and I had to drive around a man in his 30’s with a sign that read, “homeless, starving, need bus fair to Chilliwack”. It’s always Chilliwack. All three of those statements are subject to review. I am a raging liberal, and I get paid not to judge people and I can tell you right out, if you gave him money you should have looked 20 feet down the road. I came back ten minutes later and another guy was holding the sign. There were four of them, smoking on the side of the curb. This is their daily thing.

And now the kicker.

I know those guys… quite well. They are not headed to Chilliwack. They are not even homeless. They are all on disability. Giving that gentlemen 10 dollars is fine, noble even, you just need to know all the information. These are hurting people, but giving them money at two in the afternoon may not really help them better their lives. This issue is far more complex than mere charity. Persons on the edges of society have almost always come from a history of trauma, generations of dysfunction. It is a gigantic feat to imagine that they have had the same opportunities that the rest of us middle-class kids have had. Many of my friends at the camps have gruesome stories of abuse and neglect, anger and fear. They were not given a college fund. They did not get to be on the soccer team or go to bible camp or have a yearly family vacation. I’m not excusing the behaviours that piss you off so very much, but it’s important to understand the details on both sides of the equation.

The majority of our clients who are moving forward in their life, in spite of terrific challenges and often lacking the capacity to even understand normie culture, much less flourish, have been able to break free of the insane cultural and personal reality they have believed to be normal since childhood. This is, of course, a generalization. So is this – many of our most at-risk clients do not even understand cultural protocol. They don’t have proper ID. Many of them lack personal hygiene, sometimes because of a lack of opportunity and sometimes because a portion of our most vulnerable people have never learned how to fit in, or how to talk to authority, or how to walk through confrontation with grace. Giving that person 10 bucks is completely your call, I’ve done it myself. The difference is, some of us are still under the illusion that this will make a positive or substantive difference in their life. The best I can offer is that, for a majority of those (predominantly males for varied and sometimes tragic reasons) who hold cardboard signs at Safeway, you might provide them a temporary relief from their difficult lives. There are probably those who take that money and make good use of it, but they aren’t the people I know in my town and the town next door.

For ten dollars you can get enough meth to feel decent for six or ten hours.

Some of the homeless population are there by choice, but I don’t mean that in the way you might read it. There are people in the homeless camp that have housing. There are many people who have been offered services but cannot, or will not, conform to the parameters we as a society are sometimes forced to place on cultural participation. You cannot function in mayhem and there needs to be a measure of conformity and cooperation and some people are not down with that. There are others that are just so defeated, so checked out, that they are hard to reach. Mental illness is more common than you think, and without a good support network there is a likelihood that a percentage of those folks will also end up on the fringes of society. Many are in throws of addiction and people who have never had the monkey screaming in your ear have a difficult time understanding why they don’t just quit and get a job. When your life is hell, a little self-medication can often go a long way… at least for a few hours.

Some people are there by choice, but those choices are heavily influenced by ten or twenty generations of abuse and pain and misery. They are incapable of thinking like you and I think because their life experience is so vastly foreign we really don’t operate in the same realities.

I have friends who live in downtown Vancouver. I’m a small-town kind of guy. Driving in heavy traffic makes me feel feelings I really shouldn’t ever feel. It stretches my imagination to think like someone who lives in poverty off Main and Hastings in downtown Vancouver. Their day-to-day reality is profoundly different than mine. Living in downtown Hong Kong is beyond my understanding. If I have difficulty imagining a life in Hollywood how can I possibly begin to comprehend the reality for a person born and raised in abuse and poverty and broken dreams and screaming. This isn’t a liberal snowflake way of excusing unacceptable behaviour, or the naked guy outside Dairy Queen in Maple Ridge, or the fact that you’ve had all your bikes stolen. As a society we must have certain behavioural standards or it’s thunderdome. And some people are just assholes.

This isn’t about that.

Giving him ten bucks makes you feel better. I’m not saying you did it for selfish reasons, it just is what it is.

So let’s recap:

giving money to a person, believing they are starving or just need to get enough money to get to Chilliwack may be commendable but may, just may, be a tinsy bit naive.
The problem is much bigger than just a lack of ten dollars.
The problem is much bigger than just a lack of ten dollars.
There are no easy solutions.
The problem is much bigger than just a lack of ten dollars.
Ten bucks may not get you to Chilliwack but it might get you to Nirvana, albeit temporarily. This is not always a good thing.

So give the money or don’t. You will be providing temporary, though potentially harmful relief. Best case scenario, they will buy something to eat or a pack of smokes.

Who knows, maybe a few will even make it to Chilliwack.

Phil Collins And Why You Can’t Know What You Don’t Know

Published on August 7, 2017August 10, 2017 by Scott Williams4 Comments

Growing up, so many years ago, I loved the pounding beat and consuming rhythm of Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight. The intense drumbeat was stirring; the story behind the song even more so. What follows is my own flawed memory of how the story went:

One day, while playing with a friend beside a river, Phil’s childhood friend got in trouble and began to drown. The young Phil Collins was too small to rescue his drowning companion and begged a passerby to help. The adult simply laughed and walked away. His friend died.

Years later, while on tour with Genesis, Collins anonymously sent this individual tickets to his upcoming concert. As “In The Air Tonight” began to play, Collins belted out those now famous words:

Well if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand
I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am
Well I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been
It’s all been a pack of lies

And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
Well I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
Well I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord, oh Lord

Well I remember, don’t worry. It was the first time, the last time, we ever met.
And I can feel it coming in the air tonight…”

Collins turned to the audience as the lights came up on one seat, one man, and yelled something like (accounts vary) “It was you, you S.O.B.!

Powerful stuff. Revenge.

So what, then, is the moral of this story?

The moral is that this story is not true. I told that story for over 20 years in front of thousands of people and it was complete crap. Fabricated nonsense.

The moral is that we love a great story, that we are prone to believe untruths when they are packaged in such a way as to draw us in. Disinformation. The moral is that it is very tempting to blindly accept anything you read for the sole reason that it is sending a message with which you want to agree. These fairytales are powerful because we all want to believe in words like destiny and fairness and happy–endings. The moral is that you are far more likely to believe something if you already agree with it; and the age of mass media is overwhelming our critical systems. The exploding cacophony of information eventually strips us of unbiased thought, and we were always friends with Eurasia. Big Brother is programming you. See, I just did it again.

Bringing the apocalyptic into my story creates a defining moment which just happens to be bullshit. Calling your opponent Hitler is a convenient way of labelling someone in such a way as to discredit further investigation. Easy labels diminish the truth. Things are rarely as absolute as in the land of stories, and the impact of such things as the rise of bionomics, media, and reductionism, is profoundly beyond what we can imagine. Let that sink in for a moment. Humanity gleefully embraces a future that it does not understand; has not reckoned with an impact we have yet to invent.

Reality cannot be contained in a YouTube video. Your primary belief systems warrant intense scrutiny. The world is filled with loud and profoundly ignorant voices, screaming for your attention.

Phil Collins confirmed it hadn’t happened. Like most of the polls and trends and arguments between the huddled masses, this was the creation of a storyteller whom no one took the time to investigate. One discredited study on autism and a child dies in the prairies because people believe stuff that seems right to them at the time. Some pseudo-scientist creates a Youtube video about the earth being flat and seemingly reasonable people start to think that the sun is 3000 miles above the earth, and the government is spreading mind-altering drugs using airplane contrails. The president of a neighbouring country was actually born in Kenya. Carrying a concealed weapon becomes a must if you want to avoid a terrorist attack. Those Syrian refugees, fleeing unimaginable persecution and a situation you literally know almost nothing about, are all terrorists. Jayden Smith knows the mysteries of the universe. Muslims cheered when the twin towers came down. Donald Trump is the messiah, or the Anti-Christ. The list of the ridiculous is seemingly endless.

This is by no means a confirmed fact, but it is apparent that many of us watch a single YouTube video or read an article and are willing to fundamentally change our belief systems or argue about a belief we know virtually nothing about. I cannot count the numbers of people who are convinced that something is true because they spent 20 minutes online or heard it from a “reliable” source. It is a sure bet that millions of people get their politics or religion or theories about life from a few solitary sources that agree with them anyway. That Zeitgeist movie seems to make sense. Those documentaries on the way they treat chickens, or that conspiracy about how the moon landing was faked, the FACT that the government is covering up contact with aliens, or the opinions of uneducated actors or musicians or some geek with iMovie, appear entirely believable. I have witnessed arguments at parties between individuals who clearly know very little about science or reality but are willing to virtually come to blows over a topic they watched on YouTube or read about in a forum of like-minded and biased idiots like themselves. Few of us take the requisite hours to actually perform real research. We are the media generation, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous opinions and 5-minute ready to believe theories.

The objective truth is that it takes hundreds, even thousands of hours to understand concepts like philosophy, politics, or basic scientific principles. When Will Smith states publicly that he considers himself a physicist, he speaks in ignorance. The profound insights of actors and amateurs are usually neither profound nor insightful, in any real sense. Becoming an expert in any field requires years of directed study. You cannot become a martial arts practicioner by watching a series of videos and you certainly aren’t qualified to even speak about vaccines if you base your opinions on something you read in a chat room or online.

By now most of us have heard of the Dunning-Krueger Effect. To put it another way, we don’t know what we don’t know. We lack context. It is impossible to assess something you have never seen before. The first warriors on the receiving end of gun powder lacked the capacity to appreciate why they were about to die. American troops in World War Two were flummoxed by the Kamakazi. The thought of a volunteer willingly slamming their plane into an aircraft carrier seemed ludicrous in the extreme. We can only comprehend that which we already know, at least in passing. We cannot understand what we have never even imagined. As Heisenberg so eloquently mused, “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” There is the world as we understand it, the philosopher said, then there is the world as it really is.

We must be careful of our own thinking. When I was younger I knew everything, or so I thought. The older I get the less I seem to know. The essence of wisdom is not intelligence alone. We must experience in order to comprehend. We must, as Covey quipped, seek first to understand, and then to be understood. There must be humility, wonder, and hard work, before we can really know anything of value. Abandon your absolutist opinions and spend a hundred or a thousand hours learning about that thing before you make a fool of yourself in that chat room.

You’ll be glad you did.

The Idiot Genius That Is Carl Pilkington

Published on April 25, 2017April 25, 2017 by Scott Williams1 Comment

In the early 2000’s Ricky Gervais was one of the first to harness the power of the podcast to reach millions of people. Together with one of my favourite deadpan comedians, Stephen Merchant, Gervais hired a location and a production geek and set to work. He and Merchant would host an off-the-cuff radioesque podcast made to seem like it was made up on the spot. Early in Season One Gervais began throwing a few bones to the tech working the show and Internet history was born.

Karl Pilkington seemed to have a normal and successful life. He was married and an Executive Producer at a legit media heavyweight, seemingly a position which would require a good deal of smarts and an exceptional talent for getting ahead in a cutthroat industry. It was apparent from the start, however, that Karl Pilkington was no ordinary media geek, he was comedy gold.

Merchant was actually the meaner of the two. He was fond of telling Pilkington that he was a subhuman ape, a moron or an idiot or one of those amazing British ghetto language terms, thrown out with practiced indifference. If you look up Karl on Wikipedia you will read:

Pilkington was born in Manchester in 1972. He worked as a journalist for the Sun for a period of time ^[6] and moved to London from Manchester to work with XFM as a producer, at one point unintentionally causing Gail Porter to leave the station in tears after only one show by criticizing her performance, which Pilkington maintains was an attempt to encourage her to improve.^[7] After several years he began work on The Ricky Gervais Show, broadcast on Saturday afternoons. Initially Pilkington was solely the programme’s producer. As Gervais and Merchant began to invite him to make the odd comment, Pilkington’s persona came to light and his popularity increased. Pilkington was eventually included as a main element of the broadcasts, with large amounts of airtime often given over to his thoughts on various subjects, or various childhood stories. In December 2005, Pilkington stood in for two BBC 6 Music shows for Nemone, and co-presented the shows with Russell Brand.

Pilkington was an internet phenomenon. The series was downloaded over 300,000,000 times. People composed music to Karl’s head, his various axioms for life, and his offbeat look at life among pretentious smart people who unrelentingly compared Pilkington’s head to various fruits and extremely round spheroids. I always find it amusing, when rereading his bio, that both Gervais and Merchant felt compelled to defend his persona as real. I read somewhere that Merchant was to have said that Pilkington had to be real because there was no way he would waste such good material on this “poxy” radio station or some such.

It is crucial to listen to the whole series beginning at Season One. The shows were free and this allowed the hosts not to give a crap. Both men are well educated private school boys who portray as hard-line antagonists who paraded their atheism and delight at their own observations, a detached and comedic spin to everything. It was brilliant.

Clearly friends, the shows were both a row and a tug at Pilkington’s seeming endless ignorance of common words or phrases, and an homage to his brilliance and fearless stupidity in the face of endless ridicule. By the end of the first season, 12 brief shows, the podcast was the biggest in the world and everyone loved Karl Pilkington.

Without a clear or present agenda, the men simply talked about Karl’s week, read his diary, listened to his epic blunders in “Monkey News”, and took part in a series of bizarre and often hilarious misadventures and incoherent games and stories and questions about life. Throughout the series Gervais and Merchant refused to admit that Karl Pilkington was a persona because the guy was just too weird to be normal by any definition. Hundreds of questions were asked of him and it became immediately apparent that the next thing out of his mouth was not what you were thinking.

The podcast was turned into a cartoon. Watching the animation it feels like a completely new experience, all over again. It reminds you a bit of the Flintstones, one of Gervais’s favorite analogies when making fun of Pilkington’s lack of understanding of history.

Season Five was different. The team had just come off a break, Gervais and Merchant were international stars and Karl Pilkington had a T-shirt with his round head on it and millions of people wanted to ask him questions. I remember tuning in to Season Five and finding that I had accidentally put on my Counsellor hat and things were pinging everywhere. This was a different Karl Pilkington. His head was still as big “as a fucking orange”, to quote Ricky Gervais.

An interviewer for The Daily Telegraph concluded that Pilkington’s persona is genuine.^[12]

At first it felt like I could understand him in a different way. The things he said had an air of bizarre legitimacy; and it occurred to my counsellor brain that he knew exactly what he was doing. The entire premise of the show was built around Pilkington’s ignorance and suddenly Karl appeared different, but not necessarily stupid. He had been, after all, a significant player in the entertainment engine. They talked about Karl’s wife like she was a real person and never lobbed a disparaging word in her direction. Karl knew all about Ricky’s house, had been there playing pool the night before. He knew Ricky’s girlfriend, they had spent time together. One begins to understand, as the show progresses, that the seemingly endless ego that is Ricky Gervais’s public persona clearly cares about this Idiot Abroad and it’s hard to imagine that Gervais would spend quality time with someone who appeared to drive him crazy when behind a microphone. There is a bit of a con going on, though you could argue this is a natural by-product of any chaotic show whose sole purpose appears to be making fun of a far lesser intellect.

I will never meet Ricky or Stephen or Karl so I cannot say with absolute certainty what is really going on. What is certain is that Karl Pilkington is more than a big bald head and a vision of reality skewed a little left of mental illness. One could even be offended on his behalf, if it weren’t so apparent that Pilkington is crafting euphemisms on an intentional level. It is easy to fall for the apparent and be swept away by his infectious personality and ludicrous charm. People love Karl Pilkington, he is charming without meaning to be and everyone loves an underdog. Merchant and Gervais are spectacular boors, and even before Season Five you can tell they are smiling as they talk. Merchant loves to feed Ricky’s ego and even Gervais is only screwing with your head some of the time. These people hang out.

In Season 5 it feels like Pilkington is winking while he speaks. Some of his offbeat ideas make actual sense. There is a little too much Hamlet in the ham. Far from witless, you begin to wonder if Pilkington has been playing you, all along.

I can imagine a world where Gervais or Merchant might actually be reading this and laughing their ass off because Karl really is a twot and apparently I am as well. (Un)Fortunately this blog is beyond obscure and there is little danger of that. If he really is that dense than I’m totally fine with that, assuming that I am not laughing at someone with serious mental health issues.

Karl, and you immediately feel like you can call him that, may be different, but not in a wholly bad way. Remembering, for the sake of argument, that this is merely a futile exercise because we are talking about a radio personality, one is left to wonder how brilliant he really is. Pilkington has a staggering openness, a childlike sense of wonder, and a serious wit. He understands how to roll a phrase and speaks profundity in such a way that you laugh at him while you go “hum”. When asked what is the most important thing to him he replied, “learning stuff”. Brilliant.

An interviewer for The Daily Telegraph concluded that Pilkington’s persona is genuine.^[12]

I have no doubt. The thing is, one never doubts Karl’s sincerity. Things may be more staged than they are made to appear but it is evident that Pilkington looks at the world in a profound and complex way, in spite of the obvious barbs in the other direction. Step out of your belief system and cultural context and really listen to what he is saying. He may understand reality but he does understand something about reality, and in a way which confounds. He is disgusted by old people trying to live forever, his is a pragmatic and supine viewpoint. He is baffled but some of the most basic concepts of reality but occasionally makes observations which are both incredible and beautiful.

Pilkington is an exile. He may live in London and have a wife and hold a job but he is only visiting this reality. Pilkington is a one-in-a-million, a seriously weird dude who is adored by the masses. Most marginal personalities don’t get to co-star in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In An Idiot Abroad this fool was paid to travel to 30 countries and his antics attracted audiences that numbered in the millions. One can only imagine how much filthy lucre was made by someone who appeared to hate travel and managed to be underwhelmed at the Great Wall of China. Pilkington is an internet meme.

But chances are, you aren’t.

*the apparent lack of a feel-good ending is due, at least in part, to the fact that this is part of a larger project.