Setback

I'm just putting this out there in case it helps somebody else, although it helps me, too, to recap.

I had a setback yesterday, after having lunch downtown with a friend. After being home for a bit I experienced nausea and was eventually sick to my stomach. It lasted a couple of hours, mostly because I wanted to allow it to happen, not force it, but was fighting it, too. So from about 5 until 7:00 p.m. Then I took Gravol with a glass of cold water and went to bed.

I'm still tired but otherwise fine.

Lunch was at a vegetarian restaurant on Rideau, and I only mention that because I had a sandwich made with tempeh bacon, something I don't normally eat. But I knew even before I ordered I wasn't comfortable and should just get on a bus and go home. But I didn't want to make it awkward, either, so I forged ahead.

Rideau Street is in a very sad state. I have a hard time squaring lunch out with homelessness and addiction. The drugs people are taking are so powerful and dangerous. It's Russian Roulette. It felt all wrong to me, windows looking out on the human misery and despair, eating a $35 lunch.

My friend had been advised to sit away from the front, too, but she told me about the server asking a fellow to move along who'd positioned himself in the window where a couple of women were having lunch. He kept miming a request for money at them.

In Florida he'd be sent to one of its private prisons. I don't know what she said to get him to move along but the servers all seem decent enough and used to their surroundings so I imagine it was done politely. When I worked at the store in the Rideau Centre I had occasion after an evening shift to witness the goings on at the McDonald's, now closed, and wondered if the staff had MAs in Social Work.

I told my friend a story at lunch about something I'd seen on a CBC nature show Sunday evening. I don't usually watch nature shows but TVO had something involved on and I was working on curtains for our bedroom so just had the tv on for a bit of company. Anyway, at one point I turned to see a herd of wildebeest getting set to cross a fast flowing river filled with hungry alligators. Almost to the other side a baby wildebeest got caught in the current. Its mother tried her damnedest to save it but eventually she had to let it go to save herself. The baby drowned and was eaten by an alligator. The mother, safe on the other side, looked back at the river, but her baby was gone. Then she turned away to rejoin with the herd.

It broke my heart seeing it, broke my heart telling the story at lunch, is breaking my heart typing it out now. So I remind myself, mother alligators have to eat too. Perhaps the mother wildebeest will go on to have another baby, that one older and stronger when it comes time to cross the river again.

My mother always thought I was upsetting myself on purpose by caring about the world. She didn't concern herself with it and so didn't understand why I did. I get her point of view, sometimes I wish I had it myself, but she honestly, I think, didn't get mine. It wouldn't have made any sense to her, empathizing with a mother wildebeest.

Maybe a therapist would say it's not really about the wildebeest.

I don't think I'm being unfair to my mother here. I wonder if there aren't a lot of people who grew up as she did who don't concern themselves with the world outside their chosen parameters. Certainly I grew up in very different circumstances than she did, part of a post-war baby boom of relative affluence, challenging authority, breaking down barriers to create a more egalitarian society.

Maybe we just have more caring to spare.

For years I could run on empty, trust my body to tough it out. Now my body says no, the title of a now famous book by Gabor Mate, "When the Body Says No", which is really an indictment of our society and how we're being made to live in it, as is, "The Myth of Normal".

Anyway, this all started after the Freedom Convoy took over our downtown, the nausea and vomiting, and I think it's connected but I don't know. I'm certainly feeling the effects of Russia's destruction of Ukraine and Israel's destruction of Gaza, where civil order has broken down. I almost want the Freedom Convoy to come back and try again so I can show up to physically fight back, see if that slays this dragon.

Thanks for reading.