Stuck On a Desert Island With Nothing But Your Own Books. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

I’ve often said that a fate worse than death might be to find yourself marooned on a desert island, with nothing but your own books to read.

There’s a grain of truth there.

But last fall and in the early winter, I went on a binge of throwing out old books. I’d read most of them fifteen or twenty times. Some of them were simply falling apart. I kept a few books, also very much read, but the sort of books I might want to read, one more time. Some of them are falling apart too—a bit of a chore to read when lying in bed, but I couldn’t give them up just yet. Those are mostly art books.

The other night, I was getting a bit desperate. Not quite ready to take up William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or one or two comparable tomes, I finally did the unthinkable.

I went to the short row of my own proof copies, there in a bookshelf in the hallway, and took out something I wrote a few years ago. It’s under a pen-name, it’s about sixty-five thousand words, and it was my first attempt at a thriller. I don’t even have the full set of my own books.

(Lately, I don’t bother, but I do use various spell check programs to check my proofs, as well as preview on Amazon, Createspace, etc. Also, the damned things cost money, you can’t sell them and they’re full of errors anyways.)

What’s interesting, is that I read sixty pages that first night, before putting it aside and falling asleep.

Three or four years later, I couldn’t really say if this is a good book, or how it might compare to a more traditional product. What I can tell you, (bearing in mind it is a proof copy and that corrections were made), is that it’s okay. There are sections that seem a bit muddled—places with a bit of repetition.

There are typos, missing words, and quite a number of sentences that might have benefited from having that one last clause cut.

The sentence was just too long, and that last bit did nothing to add clarity.

I can also say that the characters are okay, insofar as that goes. The story is pretty good, inspired by Alistair Maclean, Jack Higgins, Robert Ludlum, and a hundred other thriller writers. There are some long and descriptive passages, ones that could be shorter. There is a long, introspective driving scene, where the thoughts pile up and it is probably, once again, just too long. There are some things, many things, which I would probably tend to avoid, with a few more books under my belt.

There are parts where I laughed out loud, and since it has been a long time since I wrote it, a few surprises as I simply forgot basic bits of the story. The structure seems good.

So. It’s not a perfect book, and the final product probably isn’t perfect either. I think I had to write that book, in order to write the one after that, and the one after that, and so on and so forth. I had to write a few books in order to learn the craft. To develop as a writer.

I had to make a few mistakes. I had to risk embarrassing myself, and trust me, that does happen.

I think there is some sort of learning curve, not the least of which is to learn how to finish what you start, to throw it aside, to begin the next one, and more than anything, not to take it too seriously.

Because if you listen to the critics, or even to your own doubts, we would never do a damned thing, would we?

End

(So, Louis. What book are we talking about. – ed.)

(No comment. But if we’re ever marooned on a desert island, this one wouldn’t be so bad. – Louis.)

Thank you for reading.

Working Part-Time, Operating a Business Under Ontario Disability Support Program Guidelines. Louis Shalako.

Okay, so I have a small publishing business, and I also work for someone else part-time.

I’ve been on the Ontario Disability Support Program for over twenty years.

I called my social worker and asked a few questions.

I asked about the Work-Related Benefit, the Business Start-Up Benefit, and other questions.

But here's an interesting question that I didn't ask. If you can only get the Work-Related Benefit after earning $100 in a month, and if you don't go over the income limit, what effect does it have to have expense deductions...??? If you're below the limit, you don't need the deduction. You need to get up the max level, (which I take to be $200), and only then claim an expense, in order to offset their fifty cents on the dollar claw-back for everything over the limit. Right? And you are allowed deductions, after all.

But. It seems to me, if you don't need the deduction, don't claim it—bearing in mind you might make a lot of money just before the end of the year. This is more of a question than a statement.

I'm being told they go through a year's worth of reports and then adjust the next year's income. And you can only claim an expense during the month you made the purchase. Yet at some point in the process, they must average the total on a monthly basis. If you made more than $2,400 in a year, with no deductions, they want fifty cents on the dollar.

Is it that simple?

If you're on disability, the odds are you aren't sophisticated enough to pick off those sorts of questions. Let alone figure out what's the best thing to do. And sometimes your social worker doesn't know either.

One wonders if they deduct a $100 expense against $50 income in a given month, and then what? Use the negative integer in determining the monthly average of the yearly income...??? In which case you’re a lot less likely to qualify for the $100 Work-Related Benefit.

No one tells you this, they let you flounder around on your own. And it's a lot to remember anyways. We don't even know what questions to ask, sometimes.

Now, a few people over the years have said the ODSP 'helped someone buy a house.'

According to the social worker, they do not. It’s funny how people insist that they are right, to the extent of getting angry if you contradict them—even in the light of facts supplied by ODSP staff.

The only circumstances that they could be talking about would be an inheritance, a big gift, a lottery win, or a big windfall of some sort. Theoretically, you could put a down payment on a house, and they won't hit you with an over-payment by saying that it's income. Theoretically, someone could also give you a house, and it’s not considered, ‘income.’ But that is my interpretation—I didn’t actually ask that question.

As for the Business Start-Up Benefit, that is only if I start up something new—as of now that's not true. I started working for someone else, part-time, last June.

As for the internet, we agree it is vital for the publishing side, and for my labour side one must presume, as I blog and take photos for a customer and all of that. I doubt if the phone will be apportioned, but you never know. Yet some portion of that is definitely used for business. When you consider how few personal calls I get, I would say the majority of it.

You're only going to get so much out of five or six minutes on the phone.

I also think it would be pretty easy to get discouraged, to lose part of your income or other benefits unnecessarily, and ultimately to say, ‘to hell with it—it’s just not worth it.’ And yet the ODSP and the government cheerfully admit that the disabled have the right to work.

In fact, they even encourage it to some extent, judging by the slick radio ads.

***

The ODSP is unlikely to give much more than a one or two percent raise per year, (which is actually below the level of inflation and represents a yearly net loss of income), and nothing if the Conservatives win election, for the duration of their mandate.

In future, it would be beneficial to peg annual increases to the level of inflation, or two or three percent, whichever is more.

Bearing in mind not everyone would be able to benefit from these changes, the best thing the ODSP could do would be to raise the allowable earnings limit, and also raise the mileage rate from $0.18 to something more in line with industry standard. Some of the other guidelines are pretty murky, which must be a pain for staff as much as for the client.

Also, income support decisions can be appealed and must be provided in writing, along with instructions on how to ask for an internal review, and ultimately an appeal. Yet it is unclear whether decisions to withhold some other benefits can be appealed. I couldn't find anything on that on the website, nothing really clear anyways. The thing is, there's not much point in appealing if there's no way to win. Getting in the face of the staff isn't helpful as they're not the ones who wrote the guidelines. They're as hamstrung by guidelines as the client is.

#ODSP

Louis Shalako books and stories are available from Amazon.

Photo Credit.


Thank you for reading.

There Is No Such Thing As An Accident.

Chemical Valley, photo by P199, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

There is no such thing as an accident.

Things are caused to happen.

I did three hours of hard physical labour, out in the hot sun today. My left thumb hurts, and on the way home I was sort of wondering what I did to it. Basically, I had just managed to irritate an old injury.

Then I remembered the original injury.

A guy called Jim and I were taking down an old sliding barn door, I forget what plant we were working in. They were going to take the door down and put in a rolling steel, which is much easier to weatherproof. It was just some old warehouse in the back end of a chemical plant somewhere.

Jim, making a buck an hour more than me and with more experience with welding and cutting, had gone all along the top, cutting the welds on a Z-shaped strip of sheet metal that goes over the tracks. It keeps out ice, rain, weather, leaves, anything that could interfere with the smooth operation of the door.

And he had somehow missed one weld, right on the end. Somehow poor old Jim ended up on the left end of a forty foot strip of metal, on a ladder, and I was on the right side when we figured all this out. He’s supporting the weight because every other weld had been cut. He can only hold it up for so long before something has to go. Somehow I ended back up on the top of the ladder, with the welding goggles on, supporting the metal with my left hand, otherwise it’s just going to fall when I cut that last weld, right on the very end.

I had the goggles on, and I managed to find the right spot, and hit it with the torch.

Because I was blinded in the goggles, which have minimal peripheral vision anyways, I had no idea that poor old Jim was pulling, yanking and twisting down on the other end.

I suppose it was a hot day and he was not the brightest light in the firmament, that’s for sure.

As soon as the weld let go, the hundred-pound piece of metal rolled back over my thumb.

Yeah, I was like a monkey on the ladder back then. Young guys are as stupid as shit and you don’t always get to choose your work partner either. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t fall. I managed to get the goggles up, shut off the torch and somehow not drop the metal strip, which was supported by the inside of my elbow, leaving the four fingers on my left hand free to do all of that...at least until I got the torch shut off.

***

People are funny. They like nothing better than to walk through an opening where people are working—like the time I was trying to adjust an automatic door-closer on the Post Office door down in Corunna. There were actually four doors, but mine was partially open, I was on a small stepladder and it’s actually quite funny to watch people contort themselves like yogic-limbo specialists, rather than go to all the trouble and inconvenience of lifting a hand and opening one of them other fucking doors.

Anyhow, I didn’t drop anything on anybody’s head, in either incident, and that is a good thing.

Because it probably would have killed them.

Guys get killed on the job all the time in this town and every other town.

A lot of the time it’s because they’re in a hurry, or the guy that worked on something before them was a total fucking idiot and they just didn’t see the danger.

Be very careful who you work with and who you work for.

It's not worth getting killed for ten, fifteen or twenty bucks an hour.

It's not even worth it for forty or fifty bucks an hour. It ain't worth it at any price and you need to remember that.

You need to live long enough to cash your paycheque. Trust me on that one. Dead guys can't get served at the typical bank.

If you’re in the passenger side, and your work partner is driving a hundred and forty kilometres an hour in an eighty zone, the truck overloaded with tools, materials and hardware, he’s an idiot. I don’t care if you’ve only got two days experience and he’s been there ten years. He’s still an idiot and at least now you know.

I worked for at least five different industrial door companies when I was younger, and quite frankly some of them were okay and some of them were run by manipulative jerks.

I saw a few things.

Twenty year-old guys aren’t that smart. They don’t know the boss is a shyster or a jerk or just a cheapskate, too dumb to rent a forklift for half a day to complete a $100,000 job.

Know when to walk away from the assholes.

End

What Do I Do Next?

Photo by Louis, a work in progress.

Louis Shalako

I'm coming to the end of my current little landscaping job. It's a lot like coming to the end of a good book, whether reading it or writing it.

What will I do next?

There is that strange attachment to a work in progress, which challenged me physically and psychologically, as well as paying a little money. The money keeps me going day-by-day, and at least while working we don't have to confront larger issues...I worked no more than two or three hours a day, two or three days at a stretch except for the most recent, where I went back five days in a row.

That's my big question. Who else in this town would hire me on such a basis, paying a decent rate and supplying tools and materials...???

That is one very good question. The other question is how much the ODSP will dock next month's pension cheque, and what kind of a position does that leave me in regarding rent, insurance, internet/phone bills, and other fixed costs of subsistence.

 So. What in the hell do I do next?

Hopefully it will be something.

Here are some previous stories.

http://bringerofrain.blogspot.ca/2016/06/back-to-work.html 

 http://bringerofrain.blogspot.ca/2016/06/lets-hope-this-dont-kill-me.html