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I’m not going to give you any guff.

Ayahuasca is no walk in the park.

Like politics, it’s not for the faint of heart. Only the strongest will survive. You’ve got to be fearless to meet Mother Ayahuasca, and when I looked around the yurt at the lost and dirty hippies sitting around chanting and smelling like carrots, I knew I was the alpha and that I was going win. I knew that Mother Ayahuasca was going to choose me.

Now you’ve probably heard that the potion the little witch doctor guy gives you tastes horrible. That’s a fact, but if you’re smart like I was, you’ll just pour a little bit of chocolate milk into the cup and Presto! It’s still not the best thing you’ll ever taste– kind of like something you might get served on a Cuban cruise ship– but you can take it if you’re disciplined.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of trying to organize the hippies and teach them about the free market, I started to experience visual augmentations to the lights in the yurt. The lights seemed to get more vivid, like they were right up close to my eyeball. The yurt was getting hotter, too, and the hippies, with all their chanting and puking and moaning, were getting more irritating, so I took my shirt off and lay down for a power nap. With my eyes closed I saw all kinds of geometric shapes and started to experience things I’d never experienced before. I felt what it was like to fly through the jungle like a toucan. Eyes looking at opposite sides, I felt what it was like to crawl on the land and slip into the water like an alligator, I felt what it was like to sneak upon a prey like a puma, I felt the energy of a bull.

It was awesome, like playing football or throwing the shot put a mile.

I really felt like I was in the zone, so I started to do some push-ups. I think I was up to around 75 when Mother Ayahuasca appeared to me. Pretty average looking. You hope she might look like Cheryl Ladd or something, but that’s not the way it works.

Anyway, she looked at me, like really deeply into me, as if she was trying to intimidate me or something. Fat chance. So I stared right back at her. There’s not a staring contest, in any dimension, that Doug Ford can’t win, dammit. This seemed to throw her, so she spewed a whole bunch of snakes out of her mouth, but it takes more than that to scare a Ford.

Eventually she turned into a lake and invited me to go for a swim in her waters. Now I’m a happily married man, but I did as I was told, and I tell you it was like one of those Vulcan mind meld things. Suddenly, the sacred herb told me everything all at once, and I knew how essential strong governance and fiscal restraint were, not just to my life, but to all life. 

I had major, very complicated surgery, and for two weeks after the operation– first thing in the morning– the attending nurse would always ask me if I knew where I was. It was a simple question, one that I found a little bit insulting even, but the truth was that I just wasn’t sure.

I mean, I knew who I was, that I’d had heart surgery and was in hospital, but I wasn’t clear on what hospital, or where this hospital was located. Some days I thought I was in Montreal, other days Ottawa, sometimes when I heard the rhythms of an African tongue, I believed I was in Cape Town. Depending on the accents, language and ethnicity of those around me, I imagined I was in India, Australia or China, occasionally, even in Toronto, the city in which all of this was unfolding.

Each day was like waking into a dream, a realm where things were still being shaped. The people moving about in my field of vision were distant from me. It was like they existed in another dimension, and communication was mysterious, even impenetrable, as if something fundamentally untranslatable existed between us. I was, I guess, still disconnected from the conscious, living world and through fogs of trauma and medication, remained a spectator to the existent.

I communicated with very few people during this time, but I did send texts to my wife Rachelle. These are some of the ones I sent to her during the early stages of my recovery:

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Very thirsty. Want popsicle but they won’t let me have popsicle. The nurses are all very mean! Don’t understand. Please bring popsicle. CHERRY.

Why are you not here with popsicles? Very lonely. Very lonely for popsicle.

I love you.

Did I miss the spring?

Why are we in Africa? Were we visiting Douglas?

Oh. Not in Africa. Nurse said that, but thought she was lying.

Am scared when the machines beep. They are sounding an alarm to say that something in my body is broken or on fire.

I miss your blue, blue eyes.

My nurse is an assassin. Cruel eyes and self-loathing. Might be a serial killer. Am terrified when brings me my pills. Must kill her patients and then gets drunk at night, feeling powerful.

I want to be in a lake. Dog just about to jump in from the dock.

What’s going on in Game of Thrones? Has everybody been raped and killed or do some survive?

Food here not made with love. Sort of thing you give jailed enemy.

Do I have jailed enemies now?

Would like to have several jailed enemies. That would be AWESOME.

Brian and Laura should be thrown in tower.

Never heard a word from them. They only care about volleyball and renting house for Pan-Am games.

Is Hunstman spider fastest land creature? Can’t remember.

I want to sit on a sloped field of green with you and our son Jones, drinking lemonade on a checkered blanket, the world around us.