Tag: speaking truth to power

In a move that should absolutely surprise nobody, the DPJ thinks that they can block my Charter Right to Freedom of Expression!

I’m expected in Family [Kangaroo] Court in the next couple of weeks, and in their filing, the malignant “Youth Protection” racket is spinning me to be an abuser, instead of the abused. They’re painting me as unstable, violent, and hostile. They’re likewise going to ask the judge to make me surrender said same right, and stop talking about my case at all.

And in case that doesn’t work, they’re also saying that either my disabilities are lies, or they are so debilitating that they should be allowed to discriminate against a disabled man and keep me from my children.

So, I am in what Trekkies refer to as the Kobayashi Maru Scenario: A no-win situation; a test, not of my ability to win, but of how I act in the face of certain defeat.

So first and foremost, I will maintain these log buoys until such time as my voice is heard, or the situation is otherwise resolved.

Even when the cover art is done and I return to my How to Get Your Foot in the Door of a Publisher, or Why you Should Say “Fuck it,” Have the Book Beta Read, Rewrite the Bastard a Couple of Times, Pay for Editing, Pay For Cover Art, Even If You Have to Save to Do it: Pro Tip: Start Stashing Away Some Money When You Start Writing Your First Draft posts. (Look, I’ve said from the beginning the title of my non-accredited university-level course is a work in progress.) I am still going to post about what I’ve gone through, and what I’ve survived, and most especially, who I have become.

I’ve already described how I was the victim, not the victimizer in our marriage; how my ex-wife made me feel like her employee, not her partner; how I had to hide money from her in order to be able to do anything on my own; how she denigrated and isolated me from my friends, policed when and where I could go out, while she could go on weeklong road-trips with her friends (anyone see a pattern emerging?); the emotional manipulation, gaslighting…I’ll repeat my testimony here, and restate it while defending my right to post my grievance in family court, and if necessary, from criminal court, if I have to. I’m willing to go to jail for what I am writing about in this, my personal website. The only compromise I will make is further obfuscating the identities of the dramatis personae, for the sake of anonymity.

It should go without saying that I will respect my children’s privacy, and not share personal details not relevant to my testimony. I will share the happy anecdotes I remember, and I will talk openly about those instances where either my ex wife or the DPJ was interfering with my relationships with my children. (Like when M. asked Leia those inappropriate and leading questions and she told me it was suss)

But as far as family court, I don’t honestly think the judge will have any interest in my testimony, my truth; or the truth at all: just the version of the truth that the DPJ give up on the sacrificial altar of misandry.

I know that no matter what I say, the family court case will not in any way, shape or form have a positive outcome for me, or my wellness. They’re already going to try and get me on contempt charges because when I was told of their motion to recuse themselves of the case and help my ex-wife gain full custody and therefore keep me away from my own children until they are all 18 years old.

By the time Leia and Luke are 18, I’ll be a 60 year old man.

Not only are the DPJ refusing to acknowledge my truth, now they are trying to keep me from speaking it at all, because “SOMEHOW” (Read: someone told them about it) my kids found this blog, and for the first time in their lives heard MY side of the story; I never said an unkind word about their mother to them. Here in this space, my personal weblog, I would say that my ex-wife was the instigator of most of the arguments that devolved into shouting matches between us. I owe my fair share, but it takes two to tango. Do I talk shit about her here? Yeah, given what I’ve been through, I mean probably; and considering I’m not naming names, and this is my personal webspace, I really don’t see how that’s anyone’s business.

I’m going to say this, now: I may be a bad person, I may be struggling like Sisyphus to be a better person, but at my core I am two things: first and foremost, I am at the very core of my being a loving father; I have always been loving, nurturing and kind with my children. And then, just beyond that solid, immutable inner core of fatherhood, my outer core is that I am a writer. Being a writer used to be my inner core; then my children came into this world, and my life, my purpose on this Earth were irrevocably changed; for all my faults, which I own and am ashamed of, I like to believe fatherhood made me a better person. But though I am now a father first and foremost, I was once first and foremost a writer, and just as I will always be a father first, I will always be a writer second.

As such, I adamantly believe in the right of free expression, and the right of information to be available, and I am willing to go to prison, if it means fighting to exercise my right to be heard. That goes for “FREE PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA” as it does to “YOU WILL NOT KEEP ME FROM USING MY PLATFORM TO SPEAK MY TRUTH” or “BOYCOTT, DIVEST, SANCTION,” “FREE LUIGI” “DENY, DEFEND, DEPOSE,” “FUCK THE POLICE,” or anything else that would have the pearl-clutchers’ panties in a knot.

I will truck no bigotry, queerphobia or speech designed to incite hatred or violence, but honestly, given the dangerous alternative, I will even fight for those loathsome bastards’ rights to express their stupid, violent bigot positions:

You can’t get rid of bedbugs by leaving them to fester in t he dark; you have to first shed light on them to make them go away. So it is for hate speech. Banning it, hiding from it only makes it stronger, more dangerous. What’s happening in the Ignited States and Israeli-settler occupied Palestine are prime examples of what happens when bigotry and hate are ignored until they are normalized and even embedded in the politics of the nation, instead of speaking truth to power, with surety, with the courage that comes with verity. For Christ’s sake, with all it’s identity politics and institutionalized bigotry, Quebec could be accused of the same villainy.

I am willing to go to prison if it is the consequence of speaking my truth, of sharing my experiences.

They are quite literally trying to deny me my voice. And their latest excuse is that my kids “found out” (I wonder how) about this blog, and are upset by what I’m posting.

I’m sorry to have upset my kids. My intention has never been to cause them any undue stress or harm. I would never deliberately cause them harm. In fact, I have repeatedly and openly admitted how ashamed I am of how I would behave when in a crisis for my undiagnosed-at-the-time personality disorder. I have tried to tell them how sorry I am. I can’t even quantify how much shame and regret I feel for every distress I have made them suffer.

The DPJ’s accusation that somehow I’m shattering their childhood innocence is ridiculous; my smart, sarcastic, clever kids make the kids from Roseanne look like the kids from Leave it to Beaver. Their mother was allowing them to watch Family Guy and other adult-oriented entertainment when they were still in diapers; are her feet being held to the fire over it? No.

I recognize that my behavior is what caused the alienation between me and my children. I recognize that during my breakdown, my behavior caused my children harm, upset and even trauma. It should go without saying I never intended to be the cause of anything bad in my kids’ lives. Hell, when Obi-Wan was a toddler, he choked on a piece of apple and I had to give him the Heimlich. I was devastated, not just because he almost died, but that I caused him physical pain while saving his life, when he was too young to even understand why I hurt him, even after he calmed down and I tried to explain what happened to him.

So believe me when I say I recognize my fault in all of this, and I am mortally ashamed, mortified of my behavior, of the person I was; a person I don’t recognize, anymore. Now I am a person that even the judge in my criminal from against the social worker I rage-texted told me that I am no longer him. In fact, the judge’s only admonishment was to stop being so hard on myself; I told their honor I would take it under advisement.

What I did not expect was to come out the other side of my struggles, penitent, lucid, ashamed of who I was, ashamed of what I’ve done to my children because I was sick and untreated for so long, now a new man whose only desire is to reestablish a relationship with the three people in the entirety of reality who matter to me most, and be denied the privilege because of nit-picking bigoted bureaucrats who care more about their agenda than they do a fathers’ rights. I would do anything for my children; I’d crawl over hot coals and broken glass to just gain their forgiveness. And I will always hope and wait for the day we are reunited, even if it is only because they seek closure.

Hell, I’d let them take a swing at me, if they want. They deserve to take a pop at me for what I said in those texts they “stumbled” across.

Hell, I already got one not-entirely-blocked and yet-entirely-well-deserved Lightsaber whack to the left knee that, if it was deliberate, then it only makes me more proud of my young Luke, who with what little training I had given him, defeated me, and gave me some comeuppance in the process. I am someone who has lovingly practiced Lightsaber Kendo for more than a decade. And with only a few actual duels under his belt, my son took me out with a most impressive form and execution. The boy is a natural athlete, and he is going to be as much of a powerhouse and unstoppable force as his brother and sister.

My children have never stopped humbling, impressing, or surprising me, and I am proud of everything they’ve accomplished in life, at their so very young ages. Early days, so much unfettered potential.

The only good thing I can say about the DPJ is that they made sure my kids have the help and guidance they need. For that, I am honestly and sincerely grateful. Concerning everything else that the DPJ has done, they can go fuck themselves off all the way to the gates of Perdition.

If the knee-whang Luke delivered wasn’t deliberate, I deserved it nevertheless. Not just because of what I have done and failed to do previously, but also because he got under my guard and struck a decisive blow. I thought I had blocked it, but polycarbonate Lightsabers are more flexible than the ones that emit a beam of electromagnetically-locked plasma, focused and amplified through a kyber crystal and turned into an omnidirectional energy blade. So I got whanged. HARD. My fault for not anticipating moves I hadn’t shown him, or that he was so quick to adapt and improvise. My fault for underestimating my young Jedi because I was slow and clumsy at his age.

I underestimated young Luke; the learner surpassed the master. He defeated me by using my own technique against me. He has warrior spirit. I love him and I am proud of him, and I got exactly what I fucking deserved when he whanged my knee whether or not it was intentional, for both moral and technical reasons. This is the Way.

I am not the one responsible for the kids discovering my weblog. It is not my legal burden that they found my writing space. The fact that they did means they were (more likely) fed the information, or discovered it on their own. Did I say [write] that I wished I could seek them out? That I want so much to be able to communicate with them again? What alienated father who can stand to look himself in the mirror wouldn’t hope to find some means of reaching out to their most dearly loved ones?

If it is the former, then that’s just more proof of active attempts to alienate my children from me. If it’s the latter, then I have the solace of knowing my children at least want to know where, in my life, I am. What better place to tell them about the man I’ve become than here?

And, I also recognize, as does my psychiatrist, that my breakdown did not happen in a vacuum; it takes two to tango. The DPJ had their part to play, whether they want to admit it or not, whether they want to believe it or not; people don’t just spontaneously combust; something always sets them off: there is always a trigger, and there is always a finger squeezing that trigger back, be it slowly, or in one quick shot.

During my struggles following my liberating separation from my ex-wife, I lost my friends, one by one, dropping like ducks in a row. I recognize that this is my fault, and has to do entirely with how I behaved toward them. All I can do now is to be better every day than I was the day before. This is the Way.

Yes, I also admit that towards the DPJ I am angry, I am verbally hostile, and I have no respect and nothing but contempt and loathing for them because of what they made me survive. But overt hostility towards people I feel have done me a grave injustice does not mean I am a danger, or violent, enraged, nor intimidating, nor threatening, physically abusive, cruel to animals, a serial arsonist/killer/mime/birthday clown or right-wing podcaster.

I’m not unstable, and the only reason I may be unreliable is because I have chronic health conditions with symptoms that I have to deal with every day. If I’m puking my guts out, I’m sure as hell not going to invite my children to come watch me puke my guts out. If I’m in agony, arthrosciatic or mechanical, I certainly won’t be in any condition to see my children. And my disabilities should NOT in any way be used to justify keeping me from my children. I could have seen them by videoconference, online chat, a myriad of different ways. I even proposed them to the DPJ, and the remained uncaring and unmoved.

The DPJ asked for access to my latest psych evals. I asked them to answer a question, one question, in writing: Why should I trust you not to cherry-pick your information from my psych evaluation, which I know for a fact that you did, last time? They refused to answer in writing, and thought they could send me obfuscating tangential legalese nonanswers, instead of providing an actual written answer to the fucking question.

That in and of itself is a gross demonstration on their part of very bad faith. So I cut off all cooperation with them, after discussing the situation with my psychiatrist.

Meanwhile, without access to my file, and given my hostility towards their insincere offers to put me in a room with my daughter, or even send my children any kind of message at all, they are trying to paint me as a violent man, as unstable, and as a threat to the health and safety of my children, then have the gall to accuse me of being uncooperative when they literally weponized the art of manipulating the truth to fit the narrative they are pushing.

The DPJ are discriminating against me because of their unspoken rule of Always Blame the Man. I am willing to go to prison to defend my freedom of expression. The DPJ also refuses to acknowledge any of the progress I’ve made as I’ve struggled to shed the skin of generational and conjugal abuse that made me into the monster I was. They cherry-picked the last psych eval I let them see in order to paint me as irresponsible and unreliable, they claim my diagnoses of arthrosciatic pain and cyclical vomiting syndrome are lies, and they think I’m using my knee brace and cane as a fucking prop.

Next, they’re going to demand access to my full medical records.

This place is the only venue I have to express my pain. It is my private website. I own and operate it. If their mother doesn’t want our children to access my website, this website, if their mother does not want our children read about what I went through in our very dysfunctional marriage, if their mother doesn’t want my children to have even a minute connection to me, if their mother does not want them to hear my side of things, if their mother does not want them to learn that I was never, in any way, physically violent with her. While she would berate, belittle, bully and demean and threaten me constantly; that she would even get up in my face and physically intimidated me, there’s a simple solution: Be a responsible parent and monitor and where necessary filter their online content access.

Instead, the DPJ would rather silence me; better to hide their transgressions.

I WILL NOT ALLOW MY CHARTER RIGHTS TO BE REVOKED BY A BUREAUCRATIC ARM OF THE QUEBEC GOVERNMENT THAT ACTS WITHOUT OVERSIGHT, LIABILITY OR CONSEQUENCE, AND THE UNBRIDLED POWER OF A MEDIEVAL PROVINCIAL DUCHY.

Just because Quebec is a medieval provincial duchy does not mean I have any obligation to accept such grotesque abuses of my human rights.

Let me state, for the record, that I am lucid, that I am self-aware, that I practice empathy whenever I have any kind of human interaction, I do somewhere between 4 and 5 K on a treadmill two to three times a week, depending on my schedule, I am waiting to hear back from a men’s mental health and wellness organization, and my psychiatrist is also putting me on the waiting list for a clinical group for men with similar mood disorders. I’m seeking treatment for my back issues, there’s not a hell of a lot they can do for my knee, and CVS (the pukey illness not the American pharmacy chain) is something I’m still waiting on an appointment with my gastro to discuss. Meanwhile, every two weeks I have to have iron infusions, because my anemia is back, and is more aggressive, despite watching my diet and exercising two to three times a week for at least an hour each time.

Also, the DPJ has since the beginning repeatedly admonished me because my children were afraid for my health. I explained, reassuringly that while my ailments were chronic, that they were not going to kill me, and when I didn’t see them it was never, ever because I didn’t want to see them; it was always because I didn’t want them to see me sick and suffering.

The institutional bias built against me is ridiculous, and they are trying to make me look like something even my psychiatrist acknowledges I am not: paranoid. He recognizes that my mental breakdown didn’t happen in a vacuum, and agrees that the DPJ’s pressure was the likely trigger. It should not be surprising, then, that I become acrimoniously vulgar, and use Big Bad Words like shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. Oh, I call them every name in the book; and I tell them where to shove the book, mainly because every conversation with them starts out the same: we’re civil to each other, then over the course of a few exchanges, they start giving me all the reasons they think I’m not Meeting Expectations. Then comes the proselytization about how I’m failing my children, then the demands wrapped in threats.

So when I say something like, “FUCK all of you; from the youth court, all the way to the castrato you have filling the photocopiers, go take a long walk off a short pier, go play in traffic, go wave a red flag in front of a Brahman bull, eat a bag of dicks, fist-fuck a hornet’s next, French-kiss an electric light socket, stick your head in a woodchipper, eat a Tide Pod while doing the Cinnamon Challenge, bungie jump into a sarlaac pit, cover yourself in moose piss and stand in the woods naked, eat shit and die, and – and I mean this most sincerely, go fuck yourself,” it is because I can no longer tolerate their carrot-and-stick approach, their refusal to provide me any services despite bending over backwards to help my ex-wife, or the fact that they use my children to emotionally blackmail me.

I severed contact with them for my own mental wellness, after discussing it with my psychiatrist. Because every time they communicated with me, their domineering tone, their veiled threats, and the personal denigration would trigger my rage – not anger; honest, righteous rage, which I am otherwise managing quite well, thank you.

And yes, it’s a trigger; that means I can’t control the fact that when someone pulls my trigger, I metaphorically start firing proverbial, completely not real, bullets. They’re the idiots pointing the loaded revolver at themselves and pulling the trigger.

That’s why it’s called a trigger.

So when I spout off enraged vulgarities, many and most of which I learned in high school, college, and by watching Parliamentary debates and the US Congress, it is because that is how my traumatic survival response to their behavior towards me is triggered.

And they fucking KNOW it; which is why they persist in triggering me.

They say I’ve made threats, which is a bunch of fucking bullshit: if I had said anything REMOTELY actionable they’d have had me in irons and being shitkicked in an “isolation room” by six pigs from Station 44. I learned that the hard way, when they triggered me into a nervous breakdown, which let to me rage-texting the DPJ caseworker of the time, which led to said arrest and assault.

And then, because my ex-wife and I often argued by text, and I very often resorted to the same sort of angry vulgarities – because I was finally free after years of oppression to speak my mind – as written above, someone at the DPJ pushed her to file a similar harassment complaint with the cops, and she embellished a nonexistent history of husband-on-wife domestic violence just to get them to be extra brutal once I got picked up.

You know what I texted that was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Something along the lines of “I’m moving on with my life; I’m not going to communicate with you in any way, shape or form, anymore. Fuck you, and have a good life.”

She’s painted herself as this frail victim, when she used to relish telling me stories of how she would get revenge on her ex-partners, usually by cheating on them with someone they would absolutely be jealous and resent of or a close friend or family member. She’d already alienated me from the latter, soo…yeah. Likewise, she told me of the many times she got other guys to kick the shit out of some other guy who’d done something to displease her…it was like she was bragging…and it frightened me, to be perfectly honest, because she also casually implied that she was not-so tangentially connected to at least one “disappeared” person; perhaps two, back in her college days in Texas.

I tried to warn the DPJ going in, at the very beginning how manipulative she could be, and that she would try to sabotage my relationship with my children.

And so, the DPJ collaborated with her, and sabotaged me. And I’ll shortly be going to youth court for another shaming, where I will have absolutely nothing to say, because in their own filing they actively dehumanize me for having behavioral issues and poison the judiciary by telling them that I said “Fuck you, the DPJ, and Judge DiPinocchio, too!” (I think I explained in a previous post how I have name anmnesia. So that’s not their “honor’s” real name, obviously.)

You know what? I did say it. You know why? Because M.S. and H.S. (no relation) were just too pleased with themselves when they told me they were keeping me from seeing my children under the terms of the previous judgement, and I would not see my children even after the last two years of hard work that I have done to change the person I am, and that they would be recommending to their “honor” that my ex-wife retain sole custody, effectively cutting me off until my children are old enough to seek me out themselves.

The earliest I could hope to see them would be in the last months of my 59th year; once the twins turn 18. I will be in my 60s by the time I can even hope to have a normal relationship with any of my children.

I am going to be an old man before I see my children, again…if I ever live to see them at all. I already live an isolated life, because before I gained lucidity and clarity, I was a traumatized, angry, and sometimes cruel person. But…it takes two to tango.

So why are they so shocked that I behave so monstrously, when they are the ones who made me into a monster?