The Road to Hell. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Recently, a radio personality here in the local market said something interesting. He said that suicides are not reported as such out of respect for friends and family of the deceased. That’s fair enough, bearing in mind all funerals are announced, and that pretty much everyone who isn’t completely destitute gets some kind of obituary. The general public doesn’t necessarily need to know the cause of death, although there are often mentions of ‘a courageous battle against cancer’ and the like.

But I have been curious for a long time, as to just what percentage of clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program, or Ontario Works, (welfare), commit suicide in any given year. 

The most cynical answer is politics, it is public opinion. It is also a little bit about how such things work.

This figure is completely bogus, okay? I made it up: but let us say that there are roughly 750,000 ODSP clients in the province of Ontario, and let’s say there are a further 125,000 on Ontario Works benefits. (That part's real enough. - ed.)

If a half of one percent of that group, or those groups, committed suicide in any given year, this could now be compared to other social, demographic groups.

And the fact is, it would probably compare unfavourably.

That is to say, it would be more—

And knowing that, we could investigate the causes, and apply some remedy.

One would think.

We don’t know for sure—we don’t have those statistics. But surely gut instinct, as well as reason, tells us that the rate for people on these programs would be measurably higher than the suicide rate among plumbers, sport fishermen, snake charmers, mountain climbers, or any number of groups in higher economic brackets.

Surely this would be a political hot potato by any ethical standard.

Surely the opposition parties, both right and left of the currently ruling Liberals, here in Ontario, would make much of such a thing.

Maybe that would be just. Maybe that’s just—

But, in fairness to the Liberals, no preceding government has ever attempted to gather those statistics, for if they had, surely this would be a matter for the public record. And, (and this is gut instinct again), certainly no upcoming government would ever undertake to record, and to gather, and make use of those statistics, because they know the only answer is money.

And all they have are thoughts and prayers.

The road to hell has always been paved with good intentions.

Whoops. Almost forgot my point. But somebody somewhere, a cop, a doctor, a coroner, knew whether it was a suicide.

This information is available ladies and gentlemen.

They just don't want to know.

For obvious reasons.

END

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They'd Gut It If They Got the Chance. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Yesterday my teeth were hurting on the left side. That sort of pain will often spread sympathetically to other teeth, two or three of them in this case. Today, I’ve got a full-blown toothache, which two or three Tylenol 3s barely seem to touch, and that’s with 30-mg of codeine per pill. It’s barely lunch time and that’s a lot of dope. (Washed down with beer. – ed.)

In the past we have noted that the Ontario Disability Support Program pension is really only about $13,800.00 per year for a single adult. In the interest of objectivity, the poverty line is roughly $22,000.00 per year here in Ontario, and this writer is presently paying 69.5 % of that pension in rent.

The landlord just sent a tax receipt and it’s like $9,800.00 per year. It’s nothing fancy, but it was nice and clean when I moved in and lately it’s even been quiet.

This is why we work part-time: so that we can eat something once in a while, something that didn’t come from a food bank, so we can have a car to go to work…an endless cycle, once you get into it, one with not very many good outcomes, or ‘miracles’, as people like to call them.

There’s more. Basically, I just picked up the phone and called my dentist. I’ve got an appointment for next week, and it will be covered by the ODSP Dental Benefit. All I have to do is to show the card. If the doc prescribes, same thing again. Just show the card at the pharmacy.

(All I have to do is to make it through the misery until next week.)

There’s even more to it than that. While a neighbour or a friend might also be getting a base pension of $13,800.00 per year, her medical needs are unique, and much different from my own. I basically didn’t go to the doctor’s for something like seven years before my conscience got on me. She’s in there every month, getting her meds, getting a monthly depot injection, and in her case, the social workers actually show up at her door once a day, to ensure she’s taking the pills. I looked up some of her meds and the cost is substantial. The social workers have to be paid as well as the doctors and the nurses.

Yet in terms of base pension, she’s still living thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line, just as I am. Since our medical needs are unique, and being adequately covered, this seems fair enough to me. Insofar as that goes...we'll talk about the rates another time.

To put this in perspective, if someone working full time for minimum wage had to pay for this out of their own pocket, it’s an easy six hundred, maybe a thousand a month for all of the medications that she is required to take. This is why the Province of Ontario’s Pharmacare + program is so wonderful. It’s going to help a lot of people.

The fact is, most patients/workers wouldn’t be able to afford anything like it, and therefore, they really couldn’t afford to work. Certainly not at minimum wage. In some odd sense, people on ODSP and even Ontario Works, (welfare), are better off than the lowest-paid workers. The money is not quite so good, but the benefits are a lot better and you don’t have to put in forty hours a week for some scab employer just to survive—in pain, and in some shit-box substandard housing somewhere.

This, I think, is why they raised the minimum wage.

People simply couldn’t afford to work that cheap anymore.

Just for the record, it wasn’t a Progressive Conservative idea to bring this in. It was a Liberal idea—so far the bad guys aren’t saying too much about it.

But I reckon they’d gut it if they had even half a chance.

END

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Dream Therapy. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

I’ve suffered from depression a few times in my life. It’s been chronic at times, and this has gone on since I was about fourteen. There are times, long periods, when I have been happy, and it was held at bay—yet I also remember my best girlfriend holding me as I cried, for reasons I could not describe. Those few years were the happiest time of my life, probably because I was getting laid—

Go figure.

That was a long time ago. But the fact is, I was suicidal at the age of twenty-six. All this over a woman. (A different one. – ed.)

Fifteen years ago, the same thing again when I lost my home, and got chucked in jail, (the bogus charge was later dropped), the loonie bin (that one’s on the record permanently) a couple of times. When some authority figurine tells you that there is something wrong with you, you tend to listen. What else you gonna do? This guy’s gone to school for a real long time and there are two cops standing behind you.

This time it went on for a year and a half, when every day, multiple times a day, I thought about suicide—and worse. I thought about killing other people, cops even. Mostly to make them pay. It was only when I realized that they were wrong, and that there was nothing really wrong with me, well…that was what saved me.

This shit can come and it can go, and yet we do have some control, because we have some experience, some coping skills after all these years. For one thing, we drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney, and say fuck a lot.

For some reason, winter seems a lot worse than summer, when at least I can go and sit on a beach for a couple of hours. In winter, I’m kind of on lockdown, for an average of twenty-two and a half hours a day. That’s the trouble with the Ontario Disability Support Program, all of that state-sponsored isolation.

This winter is better than last winter, when I definitely suffered from some depression.

This results in a lot of tailgaters being pulled over, dragged from their vehicles and beaten to death by the side of the road. (Just kidding.)

Last winter, bad enough, was better than the winter before.

A year ago, say October or November, I managed to hook up with a few ‘shrooms. I bought a gram, and then a gram, and then another gram. I’d been reading about micro-dosing, and I thought why not give it a try. It’s not going to kill me, right? Supposedly, it is an aid in battling depression and yet how would one ever quantify this…??? No one can say. None of them are scientists, and a lot of them are assholes.

I’ve been self-medicating since I was fifteen years old, with varying degrees of success.

Micro-dosing on mushrooms, (psilocybin), involves taking about a fifth or maybe only a tenth of a gram. You can feel the coldness all down along the spine, (it’s working all right) and the hyper-awareness of one’s breathing. Colours and sensations are lightly enhanced, and yet you aren’t hallucinating. At that level, it’s more of a tonic.

This story could go on forever, I won’t waste your valuable time. There are any number of things that you could try, not the least of which is to try and be a little bit more like me.

So, for whatever reason, melatonin is an aid in dreaming. Think about what it’s doing: it’s liberating the subconscious, in an analogous way, (it’s a completely different chemical process), to a micro-dose of a good hallucinogenic. I can vouch for this. When I wake up in the middle of the night due to some unfortunate pounding incident, you know, like from a neighbouring apartment, I can honestly say that I have been having really crazy dreams lately—and I haven’t been all that depressed. Although I did have a few crying jags today, that’s probably just a little back pain, life circumstances, and a few poor moral choices along the way. Sure, some of that comes from fucking bullshit, the death of a loved one, abject and hopeless poverty, living in geared-to-income-housing and the like.

Like the way my brother has changed, living in the rather grim 9-14 here in Sarnia, Ontario.

My nephews live there too. (Louis sure hopes they make it out of there someday. – ed.)

The dreams seem to go on and on. When I wake up, I can still sort of remember the most dominant or startling scene, and in going back to sleep, my thought is, ‘Boy, do I want to dream some more’. It works pretty well. I’ve seen family members, my best friend from way back when, the only thing missing so far is that first, really good girlfriend. The second one wouldn’t be bad either. The third one, maybe not so much...

Yeah, the visuals are really something. The cities, the towns, caves, cliffs and sparkling underground rivers, the odd-ball interiors, all up and down in some really skinny buildings, the tunnels, the boats and the cars and the crashing alien spaceships are really something.

Dreaming is cathartic to some extent. More than anything, it would appear to be the imagination at play.

Maybe that’s what was missing: my mind needs to play.

Maybe it's just me, way down inside, that needs to play...

As circumstances presently stand, the daily thoughts can be pretty grim sometimes, as we try and figure out where our next meal is coming from.

END

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