Municipal

Here we go again – Rush, Rush, Rush.

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Does no one at Abbotsford City Hall understand the concept of careful consideration, thinking things through, acting with due deliberation and diligence? It would appear, based on reading the coverage in the local papers, that the question: is it rational, intelligent behaviour to go running around madly trying to get a bid for an ECHL team, a bid that should be a year or more in the making, done in a month?

Desperation is a very, very bad position to be bargaining from. And Abbotsford City Hall is well past desperate on this matter given the multimillion dollar mistake they made on Plan A already, in not having the common sense to secure provincial funds BEFORE taking it to the taxpayers. Now they face the looming possibility of the mirage of an ECHL team they sold the taxpayers as part of their snake-oil sales pitch, disappearing the way all mirages do when approached.

How many more dollars is Abbotsford City Hall’s desperation going to cost taxpayers? What is Abbotsford City Hall willing to pay to avoid being so clearly stuck with a white elephant of an arena? Given their demonstrated inability to admit misjudgement and accept responsibility for local taxpayers being stuck footing the entire bill for Plan A, one can only expect them to adopt an attitude of “cover our A**es”. I fear, based on their attitude and performance so far on Plan A, they will be willing to spend any amount of taxpayer’s money in order to hide from reality or acceptance of responsibility.

I have little doubt that with a willingness to throw any amount of money at this situation, you may well be able to find a black knight to ride to the rescue of Abbotsford City Hall and their white elephant. I say black knight because the bills for this team are likely to end up being paid by taxpayers.

Should Abbotsford City Hall find their black knight I think we can be sure of two things. The first is that Abbotsford City Hall will crank up the smoke machines and roll out the mirrors to once again sell a mirage to taxpayers. And two, that all the important financial arrangements and agreements that lead to a team in the city will be deemed sensitive and hidden from taxpayers as none of their business.

OK three things. The third being that should you decide you really want to know what was agreed to and pursue the truth trough “freedom of information legislation” the city will fight you, as they have and continue to do with those seeking full disclosure on the original finances for Plan A.

This behaviour has left taxpayers only one option in dealing with Abbotsford City Hall: caveat emptor – let the taxpayer beware.

Hmmm

Surreal Mind Voyaging

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I want to share what may well rank as the most bizarrely weird and surreal occurrence to transpire in entirety of my current existence within this space/time continuum. I am just not sure that the English language, or any language with the possible exception of Navaho, has words capable of expressing the concepts and ideas needed to truly convey the strange eeriness of what took place among the neurons, bio-chemistry and pathways within my brain. I can but endeavour to give you a taste of what was happening in my head when:

Atomic explosions in my brain
Threatened me with being insane

I find the “Holiday Season” stressful and gloomy, so my focus in December was on surviving the Season. This year I navigated the shoals of the season with the most success I have had in decades, sailing through without encountering any real rough weather. I fell into the trap of congratulating myself on my solid mental health. As so often happens when I become smug about progress on the mental hygiene front the Universe rose up and smacked me back into reality.

So it was that a few days before the start of the New Year Mr. DEPRESSION came to visit. Now, over the last few years in my quest to continue on my path to recovery and steadily improving mental health I had endured and dealt with a few visits from his much smaller, younger brother Mr Depression. This visit was from the Big Bro’ – Mr. DEPRESSION himself, taking hold and dragging me down through the floor my medication usually puts on Depression plunging downward into a Hole of Calcutta pit of despair, where the old “floor” was now a ceiling appearing higher than the stars themselves.

Mr. Big D brought along his old friends, and my old acquaintances, anxiety, panic attack, obsessive/compulsive behaviours, agoraphobia, fear, anger, low self-esteem, old ways of thinking, destructive core beliefs, squirrel on a running-wheel run-a-way thinking et al. Up until this visit, while I may have been depressed, my head was full of “reasons” to be depressed courtesy of these travelling companions who filled my head with their ceaseless screaming chatter. So it was that I came to be facing the New Year with a head full of negative voices and depressed as *bleep*.

This time however I was not standing on the precipice unarmed, helpless and cowering before DEPRESSION and old acquaintances. Over the past months and years I have acquired a toolbox full of tools for maintaining and improving my mental health. Knowledge, understanding, cognitive therapy techniques, support group, Wellness Recovery Action Plan(ning) all permit me to be proactive in my own headspace.

So it was that the battle was joined! Living in the moment, paying careful attention to the thoughts in my mind, examining those thoughts as they entered my consciousness, examining underlying assumptions back to their supporting core beliefs, together with the many other tools in my mental toolbox let me deal with all my old acquaintances. Steadily whittling down these mental weeds until I and Mr. DEPRESSION were left alone, facing each other in the recesses of my mind.

Then things proceeded to get REALLY strange. DEPRESSION had always before been obscured by all the chatter, the static from every other thought and voice in my head. Suddenly I found myself in quiet solitude with DEPRESSION, no distractions, nothing to come between us, just me and DEPRESSION face-to-face. Mano a mano as it were. Un-really surreal. Uncanny. Bizarre. An idiosyncratic voyage to the lunatic fringe.

As I noted the English language fails to provide me with words or concepts sufficient to convey the timeless, twilight zone, alternate dimension feel that I found myself experiencing at this point in time.

I found myself in the calm of my centered mind, almost serene – just depressed as *bleep*, enveloped by the stygian darkness of my mental illness. A rational part of my mind was ticking over, monitoring and evaluating the FACTS, seeing no reason for being depressed yet aware that what was going on was DEPRESSION. Just being, serenely looking at a world of deepest BLACK. Strange does not, can not, begin to express just how other-worldly an experience it indeed was.

This other worldliness was compounded by the knowledge of depression, brain chemical imbalances and my own mental information processing. Totally aware of the reality of what was transpiring, literally a prisoner in my own mind, of my own brain chemistry, looking out at the world through my eyes – aware of the unseen and un-see-able bars on my cell.

I knew what was going on and KNEW all I could do was endure the journey, however long it would prove to be. Time and timing of the “visit” was a part of the unreality of the situation. One night I had gone to bed upbeat. Sometime during that night Mr. DEPRESSION had crawled into my head and I awoke depressed having no idea how long HE would stay. I just knew the length of the visit was beyond my control, that the duration was up to the alchemical processes of my brain.

Calmly wielding the tools needed to deal with attempted intrusions from my old acquaintances left me alone with DEPRESSION. Calm logical, rational, almost computer like awareness, Serenity and DEPRESSION all inhabited a common space between my ears. So for the next 2+ weeks it was just ME, the logical, rational observer portion of my mind and DEPRESSION dwelling together in the calm, serene center of my mind. With the logical, rational observer that resides in my mind keeping me informed of exactly what was going on.

Each day I forced myself from bed rather than giving into the urge to hibernate 20 hours a day. Choosing a few of tasks to perform each day in order to make myself leave my dark cave and venture out into the world of light and air because I knew it was necessary to Recovery. It was also part of my WRAP plan for when Mr. DEPRESSION came to play head games.

When I ran into people in the world I let friends and acquaintances know I was deeply depressed but dealing with it and to give me extra space. Others I warned that my depression made me prone to either flaying the skin from their bodies, verbally for the most part, or simply ripping their heads off. This served to cause them to also be careful of giving me the space I needed. In the past denial had caused many problems and stresses in dealing with people. In being up front I found myself with the space I needed to function with a minimum of added stress or problems. The truth shall set you free indeed.

So it went ME and DEPRESSION with the observer providing information and dispassionate commentary. There just are no words to truly express the strangeness of spending days, hours, minutes, seconds looking at a world that is deepest BLACK with a total awareness of why it was so BLACK. As time and awareness past it just grew more surreal, even weirder. It was this AWARENESS that made this such an ultra strange journey.

Then I woke one morning, looked around, and there was light in the world again. One night *click* and DEPRESSION was present, time passes and one night *click* and LIGHT was present. In between I had made a most bizarrely weird and surreal journey through the recesses of my own MIND.

Homeless, Municipal

Tsunami?

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“A perfect method for adding drama to life is to wait until the deadline looms large” Alyce P. Cornyn-Selby

It looks as though Abbotsford could well have a dramatic summer on the homeless front. The Shelter is currently seeing unprecedented numbers of new faces, no longer arriving by 1’s or 2’s but in groups of 6 – 8. For the first time people who should have been guaranteed a bed, those with under 5 nights at the shelter, are failing to get a bed because of the volume of new people arriving and using the Shelter. At this point in time there are new faces, new people literally pouring into the city.

Abbotsford City Hall has always used “if we put in facilities it will attract a flood of homeless” as an excuse for doing nothing. When warned that they were facing a flood of homeless anyway and asked how they planned to deal with that, they chose not to see or acknowledge this possibility. Even in the face of common sense, human dynamics and the accelerating rate of homeless creation.

Yes Abbotsford City Hall hired a social planner and created and Advisory Committee on social issues, but to date the net result has been to allow Abbotsford City Hall to effectively procrastinate, taking no action on any of the pressing social issues facing the City, particularly homelessness and addiction.

“Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait – The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and reasons simply don’t count.” Robert Anthony

Abbotsford City Hall, and unfortunately the citizens, are currently facing the prospect of finding the city streets awash with the flood of homeless people currently threatening to inundate the City. At which point Abbotsford City Hall will react with its patented lack of foresight, planning and intelligence. Leaving the City facing another set of expensive, messy and unnecessary problems because Abbotsford City Hall chooses not to hear or see what it does not what to see or hear.

Aristotle taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. One would almost think he had meet those at Abbosford City Hall.