Friday, 21 June 2013

THE SUPERINTENDANTS

REVISION

A TRUE SAGA OF

MODERN CHRISTIANS

WHO ARE

BY THEIR OWN ADMISSION

AVOW-ED-LY

BORN AGAIN!

By izzy ess of dizziness

In the beginning, a Jewish man of advanced years, who looked a lot like Santa Claus, Moses and Jesus, Habakkuk and Jethro, Samson and the Baptist, John, descended and named after, Isaac, the Patriarch of all Jews, including Jesus, and His Christians, moved into an pricy apartment by the old Canal, only with the financial and social support of his kin, and his governmental meagre fixed funding for pecuniary retired citizens who have already redistributed all their assets for their kith and kin and those in the community who are good at accumulating money, gold, frankincense and myrrh, as well as BMW’s and all the other toys, available, was many times interrupted in his apartment because of the false witnessing of neighbours who complained his apartment was the source of noxious smells and vicious animals who roamed the halls and littered garbage on the pristine cleanliness of the hallway carpets.  Several times the interruptions were completely unannounced and not respective of his privacy, barging in an open door for ventilation without so much as courteous knocking and inquiring if entry was acceptable.  One of these intrusions was carried out by a gang of superintendants who came at night, under darkness and said there’s a leak in someone else’s apartment and an emergency inspection was verbally warranted.  There was no source of leakage found despite a filthy, greasy mark put upon the bathtub which was drained of specially prepared bath water.  A 24 hour notice was given only once by an inspecting superintendant who quoted frequently the rules by which the priviledged few are allowed to live in this apartment house.  Repeatedly, they quoted my neighbour who insisted I was doing something evil, certainly, to cause this supposed odour.  The superintendent sniffed the bathroom and said, “it stinks in here!” and wrote it in her report to the builder, repeatedly mentioning it to my kind brother-in-law, who was nervous, thinking I would be evicted and there’d be no other apartment in town, or anywhere in Canada, that would accept me as a tenant because of this was stated forcefully, written on paper, and verified by a germaophobic, obsessively clean clean-freak, who felt her job was in jeopardy if I was not straightened out.  This report is now in a secret file kept by her and the owners of the apartment house.  Her husband, the non-superintendent, repeatedly stops me in the hall and driveway and parking lot to tell me that “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and that he is only following orders, like the Nazi’s of WWII fame who imprisoned and murdered many folks, including Jews, and many of my relatives, because they were “just following orders.”  Of course, he can’t tell me where in the Bible, this quote about cleanliness, occurs.

I had always thought that the superintendent earned his or her privileges of lower rent and a better parking space by keeping the place clean and neat for present and potential renters.  I don’t see why that means locking the laundry room early and locking the emergency bathroom nearby until the next morning.  However, rules is rules however unreasonable they seem.  It means however that unlocking the laundry room and bathroom must be done lest it causes even more inconvenience to tenants.  People who work during the day cannot do their laundry exclusively on weekends all the time, nor can older folks, like myself, make it to their own bathrooms without accidents because of large prostates and/or small bladders and/or the leaky, twitchy bladders of the elderly.  “I forgot,” is an acceptable excuse; we all forget things, sometimes, and sometimes, more frequently if we’re elderly or disabled.  “The paper towels are often stolen!” is not an acceptable excuse for locking the doors of the bathroom during the day.  Locking the laundry room at night has no reasonable excuse except for superintendents who have an obsessive-compulsive idea of when people should sleep and when they should work.  This self-righteous idea that superintendents can dictate life-styles of the occupants of “their” building, smacks of elitism and fascism and is the stuff of dictators who start wars and carry out genocidal fantasies.

So, what is a guy to do that has limited funds with no chance of improving his financial distress and does not deal with unreasonableness with ease, as some people don’t because I has such a personality, with which I was born.  All apartment owners have their own set of rules and regulations, even those who are in control of less expensive subsidized housing.  The alternative is obvious: I have to beg the powers that be to find me a house or apartment somewhere in Canada with reduced rent and some modicum of privacy and safety for my meagre belongings and pets.  Or, I can change my life-style and give up my pets and plants and ask for a furnished apartment, such as those available from hotel and motel owners who are willing to rent, for a month, or longer, to keep their incomes up, when the tourists are no longer coming in large numbers to pay daily rents.  Or, I can rent or have someone buy for me a mobile home or actual mobile home, and have a trailer park life-style or a nomadic life-style, like those of my Biblical ancestors; the latter have never to put up with clean-freak superintendents.  I will still be able to paint and write, inasmuch as lined paper and watercolour stuff is readily available and relatively inexpensive.  The creative urge can be satisfied at very low cost, even when cooking.  I will still be able to communicate with the kith and kin who tolerate me, even love me.

Yes, dear reader, I am not a cantankerous old fart who is forever complaining and striking out at anyone who will listen.  I am, by all standards, a nice guy, interesting and entertaining, participating in a lot of normal stuff, including ping pong and bicycling, gamboling and visiting with kith and kin.  Moreover, I attend a Synagogue on Saturday and a Christian Church on Sundays more often than most of my neighbours. I like to write blogs and at present have a readership.  I like to write letters to the editors and have contributed some 50 or so to the Welland Tribune and not just a few to the Washington Post, New York Times and Yahoo.  I like to write poetry; there are some 400 of them published and copyrighted, mainly on the internet.  Some of my poetry was published by the Welland Tribune; some are in coffee-table fancy bound volumes and some are on discs, read by a professional reader and some are available on greeting cards.

I am certifiably, charming and harmless, as written in a report by a psychoanalyst to a punitive Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons who felt I needed a psychiatric report to justify their continuing licensing of me in the practice of medicine, specifically, as a qualified Family Physician, the only one in town who was practicing Psychotherapy, as a member of the Canadian General Practitioner Psychotherapists Association.  Because of pressure by the Psychiatrists, the CPSO sued virtually all the GPPA’s in Ontario and successfully grabbed from $50,000 to over $300,000 from each of us with the aiding and abetting of OHIP who had the authority to withhold payments of wages earned from the Practice of Medicine.  At least two physicians, a pediatrician in Welland, and a GPPA in Toronto, committed suicide because of the accusations of fraud leveled at them by the OCPS and OHIP.  At least one GPPA in Welland just gave up and retired when all his income was grabbed by OHIP and his Medical Group.

I assisted in organizing and conceptualizing GGPA conferences and wrote frequently for their newsletter.  I was honoured to be the President of this organization for a short period.  I am frequently stopped on the street by people who recognize me and compliment me on the work that I did for them or their significant others.  There’s even an old patient of mine in this very building who says very nice things about me.  Some kith and kin actually say nice things about me to others.  Rumour has it that I can’t be lived with but there’s never a dull moment when I’m around.  So be it.  I believe I’ve come a long way in my 75 years of life.  I feel more energetic and more happy than I’ve ever felt.  Some of my kith and kin have recognized my maturing ways; others haven’t and won’t.  Two of three of my children have a very bad opinion of me and won’t even speak with me, let alone invite me over for a visit or come to visit me.  I’ve known for some time, that this is not infrequent when a person moves into his Golden Years without a lot of money.  I believe it’s not just the money, it’s the personality differences, just like the differences between myself and my present lessors and their superintendents.  One of my kin, who has been very kind to me, but did insist that I move out of his house, has said that my children and other kith and kin, including the one who told me this truth, and my other siblings, are of afraid of what I might say or do.  Everyone has a personality with which he or she was born.  Most folks nurture this personality and are happy that practically everyone else has the same personality.  Well, my personality, that I also nurture, is different than most in my cultural setting.  I’d be a lot more welcomed by the Cherokee and Maori, and, that may be a good idea for me to move somewhere like New Zealand or Utah to be amongst them.  It might be healthy for me.  I do point out that famous personalities like myself, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Pollack, van Gogh, O’Keefe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Monk and Rickles, have always lived within their social settings, usually with severe difficulties.

My dad said it all.  He had the personality of my superintendents.  At age 80 he expressed what was pent up in him for my entire life.  At a supper in a public Jewish restaurant in Toronto, in the presence of my brother who is 5 years my junior, I had asked him why he didn’t come out to see me play basketball or come to my graduations for high school and Medical School.  He became angry and red-faced.  He was literally spitting mad as he spit out, “Who could live with you?!”  It was the same outburst that he laid on my mother when he was anxious to get out of the house and gamble with his kith and kin.  Toward my mother, he would spit out, “Paskudiak Yachneh!” the meaning of which I found out only years later.  If you are Polish or have Polish relatives, it’s obvious what he was saying.  I was having a heated discussion with a nurse, when I had the flashback that made me curious, again, at about age 50.  I stepped back somewhat surprised that I was spitting mad and conceded the argument about the therapy I was rendering, quickly turning the other cheek and high-tailing it over to my Polish Head of the Department of Social Services who directed me to a Polish medical record clerk.  She turned red and said “I can’t say that word.”  I insisted.  She chose her words carefully with, “It’s the back end of a bull.  I don’t know what Yachneh means; it sounds Jewish or Hebrew.”  Jewish was what I spoke as a youngster, learning street English and then school English, growing up in Hamilton, Ontario’s poorest neighbourhood.  Not only did I grow up on the other side of the CNR railroad tracks, I grew up on the street with the CNR spur to Stelco.  Yenteh, or a young Yentl, is Czech in origin and meant a gentle gossiper or matchmaker in the old Stetl of Eastern Europe.  Yachneh was a vicious gossiper, a bitch or a fishmonger’s hard-to-get-along-with wife.  Amongst other things, the outburst meant that my mother and I were the odd, creative, unpredictable personalities in a family of clean-freaks, a fact that escaped me for many years, but easily explains the results of being feared people in my family and amongst our friends.  My mother also had another personality, which I fought against and get rid of, the fear of almost everything, like a constant Panic Attack and multiple Phobias, a source of constant anxiety, sometimes severe.  That part of her made her beloved.  She tried to teach it to me, but I was, and am,   very stubborn about such things.  I still have the phobias, but when they come up, I see them as unreasonable and thereby control them successfully.  During my lifetime, I have had many Panic Attacks.  Realizing that they were based on a sort of chemical imbalance that causes a nervous reaction that is not based on reality, has made me whole.  Fears like, the Fear of Water and the Fear of Flying, were mainly faced with internal conversation which went, “If those other folks can do it, so can I!”  Unknowingly, I had stumbled across the therapy for Panic Disorder, that is based on solid principles of Cognitive and Behavioural Modification, a powerful form of Psychotherapy, which is now known to work in even severe Depression and Anxiety, without the use of medications and without the side-effects of medications, including induced chemical imbalances, including suicidal and homicidal ideation.  Freud and Adler started this but it was probably known for centuries in the expression, “To fight fear, just do it!”  And, “the difference between a coward and a hero is that though they both panic in an emergency or war zone, one runs toward the problem or enemy and the other runs away from it.”

Getting back to my enemies, the superintendents and their sponsors, the owner of my apartment building, I’m going to do what Jesus, a fellow tribesman and ancestor of mine, suggested.  I’m going to turn the other cheek and forgive them.  What they and I do afterwards is a matter of practicalities, mainly money.  I may have to admit I’m poorer than most at 75 without much of a chance to increase my income or my assets which I could sell.  I write and paint for pleasure and the pleasure of my loved ones.  Should they ever sell, I’d be in business, until the next set of grabbers take it away from me.  I do tend to make a little extra cash with gambling, just like my dad, who taught me that small profits are better than one large bonanza.  His limit was $20 for an afternoon at Woodbine, which he reached with public transportation.  At $2 each for about 8 races for the afternoon, he then had $4 for a snack, usually coffee and a Shopsy’s kosher hot dog.  My sister who was his executor, said he always had a wallet full of cash.  She also said he never admitted he was ahead because he didn’t want his kith or kin asking or grabbing for it.  His system for betting works and is admired by folks that watch but don’t understand, nor imitate what I do.  My limit at the Casino is $20.  I walk when I have as much as $20.50 in my pocket after an hour or two or as little as $1 having walked in with only $20 in my pocket and expecting coffee and orange juice and water to be free.  This also gives me free parking and monthly free breakfasts and 2-4 tickets for selected shows.  This idea and how to play chess and cards were some of the greatest gifts I gleaned from my clean-freak, also well-dressed dad who was apparently afraid of me.  I recently remembered that when I first grew a beard he looked at me in a funny way and said I looked just like his dad.

Perhaps, I was just like my granddad whom I never met because he was a victim of the Holocaust, in an infamous Nazi Death Camp, in Nazi-occupied Poland, wherein many Poles were murdered as well as many others, including Jews.

This story has been difficult to write.  I think it’s interesting enough to publish and I think I’ll leave it somewhat incomplete.  Perhaps, I’ll work at it later on flesh it out and finish it off properly.  For now, this is it…  Thanks for listening.  I did ramble on a bit.  I’m sorry if any of my machinations were offensive to anyone.

THE END

© izzy sommers, md

Welland, Canada

June 21, 2013

It’s summertime!