i was born David Bruce Scott Petersen, and i have always been called Scott by my parents and friends and teachers, and, in fact, pretty much everyone once they get to know me. i don’t know how God chooses which family you get set up with, but i know how fortunate i have been to start out in mine. It will become apparent that i rely on my family heavily, and while i believe in treating everyone as an equal, i in no way do that in real life. It may be more accurate to say that i wish to treat everyone ‘fairly’ in the sense of British fair play, but i’m not sure just exactly how that would look and i’m not really all that sure how close i come to the fair treatment wish.
As young Scott i was somewhat athletic and had a lot of friends. i did very poorly academically. In grade 5 i remember being put through a bunch of IQ tests by a psychologist type guy and he said that i was quite smart but clearly had a problem with my current teacher. The teacher, of course, had not caused my poor grades for i had always done poorly and had always just barely passed and that is the way it continued until i actually failed to graduate. But what is salient for me about this particular teacher is my assessment of his competence. My lack of respect, although within publicly acceptable limits, was brutally obvious. This is an important characteristic about myself, and not one that i am terribly proud of, i have at times been rather intolerant of what i see as other people’s failings. God is correcting this.
In todays public education system it is quite possible that i would have been diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and prescribed some kind of medication to help me concentrate. I have lots to say about drugs and public education on UcOtt Raddio Daddio.
When i was thirteen my dad took my oldest brother canoeing down a river. We were all there. It was mom’s birthday – a beautiful Easter Sunday – everyone was kind of excited. We put them in at the top and went to wait for them at the bottom.They never came.
Much Happened.
Gods’ major lesson about tolerance was cast when i was seventeen. i was driving like a fool, as i often did, and i drove a car through a telephone pole. One of my best friends died. i wish i could say that i became a better person after that, but i’m not sure that would be true. What i do know is that i will be forever devastated that i could have been so stupid. I am broken and that’s the way I proceed. This I will later learn to cope with (Wabi Sabi) stumbling all the way. I have, in the past, referred to this incident as an accident, and in a common sense manner that is what it was; however, the word accident hardly conveys my perception of this event. Much of my work intimates at causation, and hence blame or responsibility enter the picture, and while i consciously draw attention to causal factors that obviate an individuals blame or responsibility, it is not my intention to negate the individuals role, and, most assuredly, not my own.
i feel the weight of my role in this massive tragedy daily – year after year, and while i might believe that peer pressure and my brothers speeding, and televisions’ sexy speed commercials, and my Scottish genetic predisposition to violence and and and… all play a role in my ‘accident’, the word ‘accident’ does little to convey my personal experience. i like to use a term which many people find offensive; i use the anagram MFU to convey my feelings without offending the sensitive too much. The anagram expresses the notion of Massive Mess Up, but of course Mess isn’t the word which accurately fits here. i don’t want to offend people like my mom, so i will try to restrain myself, but sometimes working class culture provides what i think of as an appropriate means of describing feelings that i have.
A lot of curiosity was replaced with a struggle to like myself. i was very quiet, for a while. i gained a radically new frame or perspective through which i was viewing whatever it is that i was becoming. i moved quickly into drugs.
i am now an addict and have been for 54 years; although, i sometimes go for long periods of time without using any drugs at all. My drug of choice is marijuana, and its been a few years, since I’ve taken a break of any significance.
i have consumed enough marijuana to have become somewhat altered, perhaps handicapped might be an apt way of putting it, but i can’t say i mind the handicap; for me it’s just a different way of looking at things. i am many other things as well and people will do well to recognize that. My short term memory has always been somewhat i could quite easily choose to avoid this issue, but that is like avoiding what i am. i am an addict. i don’t believe that it makes me bad or evil, and i am a little tired of the discrimination that drug addicts are constantly exposed to. i have put a considerable amount of effort into understanding my addiction and a lot of this is addressed at the Universe city of Ott (ucott.ca) on the UcOtt Raddio Daddio site.
imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete
My goal is harm reduction. i believe i am imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete (Wabi Sabi), but, most importantly, i am now quite convinced that everyone else is pretty much the same and different, and if i don’t stand up how can i expect anyone else too. We won’t stop violence with silence and the war against drugs is extreme violence. i will try to talk thoughtfully.
Within a few months of my MFU i met a young woman who has become one of my best friends.We got married; we had kids.
i worked relatively hard in unionized jobs for several years.i began to read, and read and read and read….i went to night school.i built things.i volunteered with Big Brothers.i bought a house.i got involved with the union.i worked on cars.i ran.i lifted weights.i graduated from high school at 22.i went to college part time.i did remedial English.
i was drawn to Sociology, and it was the first course i elected to take when i entered College.It continues to dominate my interests.i passed my college courses.i went to UVic full time.i did better.i moved to UBC.i did better.i coached soccer and volunteered for cubs and and and…i graduated with an honors degree majoring in Sociology. i often like myself.i created a philosophy called OTT .I wrote children stories and short fiction pieces.All of this i did stoned.i was indeed an addict.
i entered my post secondary education while sociology in Canada (1977) was heavily influenced by conflict theory. The chapter heading for Education in our introductory text reads ‘Education and Inequality’.That text in particular piqued my interest and after reading many of the suggestions at the end of the chapter i felt peculiarly enabled. i had questions to ask and something to say – although it was still very difficult. Ivan Illitch who i’ve come to think of as an Anarchist and Paulo Friere who i think of as a Marxist, incited my imagination. Since that initial introduction many others have contributed to my understanding of public education, and i have included a bibliography in UcOtt Raddio Daddio as a guide to those who impact my sociological imagination.
i love to think within the discipline of sociology applying a version of exchange theory that has ties to Erving Goffman and Anthony Giddens. More typically, exchange theory is associated with George Homans and Peter M. Blau, and reductively to the behavioral psychologists such as B.F. Skinner and J.B Watson; and then further to biologists, chemists, physicists and so on. Each of these perspectives offer valuable insights, and i occasionally draw on them to provide a context for the information that i attempt to unearth, but it is important to note that i do not believe that all social events can be reductively explained in time to matter. Sometimes the patterns that emerge in social settings provide access to deep understanding that is often overlooked in reductive explanations.
In identifying myself with exchange theory i am establishing my prevailing prejudice. i look for exchanges. i look for influence or forces rather than causes, but the effect is largely the same. i believe things happen for reasons. Postmodernist thought has provided some interesting insights into the problems associated with putting too much emphasis on the causal knowable world i pursue. Indeed, much skepticism amongst postmodernists exists as to whether or not rationality or even progress is possible (Giddens 1984 p231-232, Touraine 1995 chapter 3, Kumar 1995 p. 94-102). Anthony Giddens is instructive here, and while i am largely influenced by his work not all of it impresses me. For one, i never really bought the modern notion that science destroyed God. God lives in my world, and she’s very active. Much more on this later, but it will be useful to keep this in mind, for much of my work is highly influenced by Giddens; although we obviously differ in some fundamental (epistemological and ontological) ways. What i extract from the postmodernists is that i must use caution in my pursuit of reason. What often appears as rational at one moment may seem totally bias or even insane a few years or seconds down the road.
After graduating from UBC i acquired a job at UBC’s psychiatric hospital. i loved that job, and it was an excellent introduction to ‘real life’ institutionalized practicing social science. i met a lot of patients from a wide variety of professions; Doctors, Nurses, Ministers, Teachers, Police Officers, Lawyers, and Janitors; men, women, young, old, smart and not so smart. Rich or poor, it didn’t seem to matter. All seemed to have had confusing moments in which they’ve desperately floundered.
At this time i was aware of a great number of what i have come to refer to as ‘counterfactuals’. i think counterfactuals are facts that run counter to what the prevalent ideology expresses.
i was fresh out of university and in nowhere land as far as my education was concerned, or so i thought. i took whatever work i could get and studied on the side.i split wood for a couple of weeks which started to get me back in shape.i never got paid for that job, although i worked very hard.
i was a leadhand in an unemployment make work project for a few months, and then i picked up a part time job working in a group home.i had a brother show me how to dig for clams and i did that on the side. While i was at university i did some work in the summer with a man who was partially paralyzed which along with my degree and the work i had done at the hospital set me up for working with a variety of people who have special needs, and over the next seven years i worked in a variety of positions in day programs for the Adult Mentally Handicapped. i also tried to create my own job on the side by building furniture, but that was more work than it was worth.i have several day calenders that i have saved from this time that i needed in order to keep track of all the little jobs that i did with special needs adults.
i hadn’t planned on staying in Courtenay long, but as the months began to add up i saw that i could be in for a bit of a stay.i didn’t know what i was qualified for with my silly little sociology degree, although i knew that if i went back to University it would only take a couple of years to become a teacher or a social worker, but i wasn’t interested in becoming either, and i wasn’t at all interested in leaving my kids to go back anywhere. However, money was becoming a major obstacle to my pursuit of a high quality/quantity’ life so i started to poke around in that direction. i did some volunteer work at Sandwick alternative school hoping to slide into a position in the district.i was also interested to see if there was any connection between what i learned at University and what was actually going on in public education.At this time, i was also preparing to engage the local cable station in a project on public education.
much happened
became a janitor created UcOtt
UcOtt
wabi sabi
Much more happened
Now In 2026 at 71 I am about to go for a Great Big Beautiful Walk.
Things are beginning to kick in. much will happen
UcOtt is my Legacy
You have arrived. Thankyou! I want to collaborate with people like the Ragging Grannies. Their efforts inspire me like Yoko Ono and John and Howard Becker and Mr Silman. My family have done their share to keep me from being overwhelmed, and I will be forever grateful for their love. My friends and partners are working with me. Right now I am preparing for a Yoko Ono inspired walk for Peace. It doesn’t officially start until June 15, 2026. Unofficially June 1st.
On June 1st I will begin the hug collection walk. The plan here is to walk out to the airport and back to my place in Dawson City. There and back is approximately 30 K. I intend to do that for two weeks straight that’s 14 days 14×30 is 420 and I chose that because I want to walk enough to cover the parts of the walk to the peace Arch that are unsafe on the trip down to the peace arch at the border. The fact that it’s 420 k gives me the opportunity to talk about marijuana. I’m a big fan, but time and place are important here. I consume THC via gummies, and I have enough. I do not want this walk to smell like a festival. Please consume elsewhere and come get a hug because that’s what I’m collecting and wanting to pass on to President Trump. Now I don’t want to be creepy here. You can give anyone a hug, take a picture and send it to me on this site. What I want though, is that the hug you send to me be for President Donald Trump. So if you want to personally give me a hug, that’s great, just let me know if I can give it to the president.
The Great Big Beautiful Walk. My 2900 kilometer walk to the peace arch at the Border starts June 15. Safety is my primary concern. It will not be in a straight line. Indeed I might choose to just continue my airport to home route throughout the summer; however, I’ve already got a couple of relatively safe alternatives lined up, and the plan again is to use this website to organize a bunch of these alternative routes to walk. I want them all, sort of on the way down if I can, but I will see what we can connect with. the idea is to organize that through this site here.
I have a grand idea, but there is not much time. I would like to walk to the northern border and see if I could get a hug. I could do it as part of my 420 Kilometer walk. I think it will take six or seven days and I don’t really have the right cart for it. I’m going to try to get one.