joan abernethy:  

I came to ECI a few days after seeing the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens, then settled in for five years of mediocrity. Not my best show. Sometimes I think I burned out in elementary school. However life, like Leonard Cohen says about love, "is not a victory march". It's something else -- I'm not sure what. For me, the mystery of what is has always blinded my way, made it difficult to see anything but the beauty and the beastliness of being. I had planned to get a PhD in Clinical Psychology and treat inmates at Kingston Penitentiary -- my high school dream -- but I ended up studying English and Philosophy at UWO because UWO only offered scientific psychology and I'd been too intent on escaping the family home to properly research the school I chose. I went on to get an M.A. in Philosophy -- taking the path of least resistance because it turned out to be easy to get "As" in and my colleagues said the work I was doing was "original" and I could make an academic career for myself -- and then I began a PhD. But lo and behold, fate had another idea for my life. Enter the mob...except I didn't recognize it at the time. And because I didn't, I kept banging my head against the same wall for the next twenty five years or so until I found myself living in my car to avoid the death threats. No, I wasn't a drug dealer. I kept trying to talk to these people and tell them they had me confused with someone else deserving of their obsession to harm. Turns out that's not such a good idea. Negotiating with gangsters that work in public office should be done in bars not in formal petitions. They own the police, you see, and the Crown and Statistics Canada data bases and they can can easily blacklist their enemies, wrongly accuse them, get them thrown in jail, killed and so on. So that...Expand for more