Zen, Living the Dream

Zen. Living the Dream.

Louis Shalako

I ran into an old friend on the beach. I laughed when I saw him. 

That’s a kind of joy, ladies and gentlemen.

He was telling me about some work.

He was saying we could get eighteen bucks an hour. He was asking me about drywall, and framing, and partitions, and interior renovations. Something about a building or a few buildings downriver. He doesn’t have that much experience himself.

I told him all about piecework. The boss is offering so much per square foot of board, so much per linear foot of framing, so much for this and so much for that. You’re a subcontractor and you’re either making all your own contributions or you’re kind of an outlaw in this day and age. Yeah, and if you really hustle, and if you know what you’re doing, you can make a pretty good buck for someone with no real skills and no real education.

(One. I have skills. Two. I have an education. Three, I don’t want the fucking job. – ed.)

I don’t want the job. I don’t want the job for eighteen bucks an hour. I don’t want the job for twenty-five bucks an hour, and I don’t want the job for fifty bucks an hour. Yeah, I don’t want to get a crew together, I don’t want to buy a pickup truck and buy a bunch of tools and get up at the crack of dawn every stinking day (which to be fair I do anyways) and round up a crew and try and get them onto a jobsite without loaning or advancing them money so they can get through until payday and by the way we need to sit around in a coffee shop parking lot for half an hour while we’re at it. (Three or four times a day.)

KeepOnTruckin', (Wiki.)

I told him a little bit about ceilings, about hanging twelve-foot sheets of five-eighth drywall while standing on a scaffold and praying your partner will get a couple of screws in there before you die and your arms fall off and it kills the both of you, and him a married man and everything.

I told him I had seventeen novels. I told him I just got thirty bucks from Google Play. He agreed that was pretty smart, like that James Grisham guy, and I didn’t correct him on the details. He told me I need to send one of my books to James Grisham and they’ll tweak it a bit and then I’m on my way. I know what he’s saying, but I didn’t correct him on the details.

I gave him the same advice I would give any young (middle-aged unemployed guy) today.

Don’t do nothing to jeopardize that pogy claim, that welfare cheque, that annuity from the insurance company because you were in a bad car accident fourteen years ago and have some severe head injuries.

(Don’t fuck up that disability pension, in other words. – ed.)

Because in today’s marketplace, you really can’t afford to succeed. For the first time in thirty years, all of a sudden you’re buying your own eyeglasses, paying for your own rotten teeth to be pulled, and paying for your own scrip for your own narcotic pain pills, also one or two members of the diazepide family of mood-disorder inducing dopes, and whatever. You know what I’m saying.

Basically, I figure I’m living the dream. I have achieved every fucking goal I ever had, chief among which was not to work for a living. That’s why I’m not a greeter at Walmart.

I am officially retired from the world of working for some capitalistic bastard. Now I’m the capitalistic bastard—and I like it.

I like it just fine, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, I’ve been so successful at being a lazy cunt that I am now in a position to give something back to my community.

See my Billion Dollar Giveaway.

Krusty Mickdermid, Walmart greeter, (stolen photo.)

Why in the fuck would I go to work, for thirty-five hours a week at minimum wage? Hey, I appreciate the cheap prices, Walmart. But, uh, I won’t even do that for cash under the table for fuck’s sakes. You work a hundred and forty hours a month, for what? Fifty bucks a month more than I make now, and you get to pay all your own prescriptions, eyeglasses, and you’re too fucking scared to line up at the food bank. You’re standing around in a stupid shirt. You’d be surprised by how many people tell me they make too much money to go the food bank, and the fact is its bullshit. You just told me how much you make—and this is just my opinion, but you really should make a point of going there once in a while. Who in the fuck told you that you make too much money?

‘Cause my journalistic instincts are aroused. I could really make something of a story like that…

The fact is, we’re living the dream.

We won’t give that up too easily.

We’re going to sit around on beaches, write stuff, and be ourselves.

The world doesn’t have to like it or even accept it.

That’s just the way it’s going to be.

End

It Is So Over.

Courtesy David Shankbone, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

I screwed up some guts the other day.

I called and made a dentist appointment. It’s such a simple little thing. Most people take it for granted. But bear in mind that the Ontario Disability Support Program will pay for an extraction. They might even pay for a cavity to be filled. They don’t pay for dentures. They don’t pay for crowns, caps, veneers, or bridges, or any kind of cosmetic dental work.

Yet I can’t help but think that a little bit of cosmetic dental work might have been of some real benefit in a case like mine.

Sweating it out over six or seven days, there was never any real danger of me booking for the hills or failing to attend for the appointment. I’m not a little kid and I have some mastery over self.

The fact is that I went.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t a little nervous. What I wanted them to do, was to pull about twelve or thirteen teeth from the upper jaw. I wanted to get a fine set of plastic teeth, dentures.

I would like to enjoy that most simple and human of things: a nice smile.

My brother got his a few years ago. While they obviously look like store-bought teeth, the transformation was startling.

When I was about eight years old, my brother and I were fighting in the kitchen. We were fighting over a can of apple juice or something. He whapped me right in the teeth with it, chipping the upper left incisor.

When I was about ten years old, we were spinning around in the schoolyard, making ourselves dizzy and just having fun at recess. Kids do that sort of thing. Falling flat on my face, I took a real big chip out of the upper right incisor. Half the tooth was gone.

The doctor patched it up with plastic paste, which was all very well although he didn’t do a very nice job of it. It always did look clunky, discoloured, and I suppose teenagers are at their most self-conscious. I always knew it was there.

Let’s not get too deeply into the personal history, but I went through a pretty rough time. It went on for years. I neglected my teeth. At some point I had a rotten molar, and it didn’t taste very good. It smelled bad. Every time I ate, it would hit the nerve and the pain would go on until I took narcotic pain pills such as Tylenol 3. T-3s have 30 mg of codeine. When I finally worked up the nerve to get it pulled, it turned out I had a staph infection from the tooth. You get it from eating improperly washed produce, or improper hand-washing in food preparation. 

It took two different regimens of antibiotics to clear that up, before the doctor would pull the tooth.

My breath cleared right up. Even the smell of my farts changed. The staph was living in my gut and it changes the body chemistry. Imagine how hard it is to talk to people, when you know damned well your breath smells like shit.

At that time, the dentist fixed one cavity, but I really don’t drink a lot of pop and eat a lot of candy. I hadn’t seen a dentist in ten or fifteen years. That was six years ago. Okay, I’m a bit of a gagger and no one likes going to the dentist. But now, forty-five years later, that plastic patch on the upper incisor is porous. It’s a black tooth now, right out of Benny Hill and Monty Python. What with all the chips, old patches now about to crumble and fall out of the other incisor, it’s no wonder I wanted them all pulled.

It was six years ago, when I looked into caps, veneers, and implanted teeth. My old man was still alive, and I had some hopes of getting a little help to pay the $4,000.00 that a total of four veneers would cost. The dentist told me that with longitudinal cracks in the teeth, it wasn’t a good option. It was disappointing, but it was also going to be expensive, and at the time I just accepted that they weren’t going to do it. I basically just walked away because they wouldn’t give me what I wanted…

For forty-five fucking years I have lived with ugly teeth.

It really is a formative experience. It has helped to shape, in so many ways, just who I am—who I became for far too long there.

I am so fucking sick of it.

And of course we are so good about blaming ourselves, aren’t we?

I know what a pretty girl is—and I had this crazy idea they weren’t going to be too interested, in a guy with bad teeth. It’s not very appealing, is it ladies? I didn’t have too many other things going for me either—I’m not rich, and I’m not likely to get a real good job anytime soon. I’m not that charming, not that confident, not that good in social situations….and no wonder, when you know the facts.

Well, the bad news is they talked me out of it. We’re not going to pull twelve or thirteen teeth in one go. I’m not going to get my beautiful store-bought smile.

We’re going to drill down into that ugly old tooth. We’re going to do what the nice dentist says is best, and the worst part of it is, that I can’t even be unconscious when we do the work. 

With the white plastic paste, hopefully they can make it look all right…

Judging by the hour and a half I spent in that itty-bitty little chair, as they poked, prodded, tapped, pried, photographed, measured and collated, this might be a bit of an ordeal.

I have to assume that this is going to be worth it, ladies and gentlemen.

To go through life with the world’s second-biggest inferiority complex is over.

It is so fucking over, ladies and gentlemen.

And in a month or two, after two or three appointments, this will be over too.

In the meantime, I will try not to be too scared shitless.

END

Zoomer

Louis Shalako

I was heading to the smoke shack to get a couple of packs of smokes.

There was a familiar figure coming up the street on his crappy old bicycle, most likely stolen or given to him to pay off some small drug debt, (from a bigger loser than him?)

Let’s call him Zoomer.

We’re the same age. We grew up on the same street. We went to the same school. 

We played street hockey together. As we got older we drank together, smoked pot together, chased girls together, and indulged in a little bit of petty crime together.

Zoomer was clearly well on his way to alcoholism even back then. He was the only guy I know who could carry a two-four of beer on a ten-speed bike. This guy rolled joints the size of your thumb, but then he never worried about where the next bag was coming from. He would just go out and steal some more money when he ran out. This was quite shocking to staid, working class guys like me.

See, I always had to work, to earn my money.

Later, when I was going to college and had a real nice girlfriend, Zoomer was making the papers, the Provincial Court section, several times a year. He has a rap sheet as long as your arm.

He’s the one that stole a Datsun 240-Z, (someone left the key in it). He was drunk as a skunk, high on acid, and doing laps around the Central High School track, which at the time was packed clay and gravel. (Sounds kind of fun, eh.)

He looks pretty wild these days. His hair is all over the place, but I doubt if he’s cut it in years.

His face looks like it could hold a three-day rain. His eyes dart back and forth. He’s absolutely nuts. He cruises around on that bike, looking for stuff to steal. When a mitre-saw disappeared from my garage a few years ago, he was the first one I thought of. It might not have been him. It could have been somebody else. There are plenty of them, after all.

I guess I forgot to lock the garage.

His girlfriend left him and hooked up with a big coke-head. For a while there, back in the eighties, I would drive her to London so that she could visit him when he was in jail. She looked pretty good then, and I have to admit, my attraction to her felt kind of disloyal. 

There’s no doubt she would have been better off with me…such was my thinking.

After seeing her in recent years, I’m kind of glad that didn’t happen.

She dumped him when her mother died and there was some chance of inheritance…I guess she could see, even then, which way the wind was blowing. It wouldn’t have lasted very long, would it? A half a million bucks would have kept Zoomer and her going for about two, two and a half years…

There were times when I envied that guy—envied him. Shit, he had girlfriends, some of them not too bad looking, and at some point in my life, I was always alone. It was only when you went to their house, sat there and listened to them talk, when you figured it out.

Who else would have him?

No one in their right mind.

The women were as bad as he was.

No one was more impressed than I was, when Zoomer got a job. Predictably, it was the sort of job where no one really cared if you showed up hung over, called in sick, or stepped outside to smoke a quick doobie or two on your lunch hour. When the bosses went home at four-thirty, that’s when the beer magically appeared. Guys down there love their overtime, eh?

It was a shitty place to work—all kinds of resin, fibreglass, and fumes in there, and so I never applied there.

My buddy taught me how to boost a car stereo, open a car door with a coat hangar, how to shoplift, how to make rock cocaine from powder, all sorts of things really.

He’s still out there. He’s on the street, although I’ve seen him and one or two others coming and going from the homeless shelter. One wonders where he would find a landlord dumb enough to rent to him. The welfare claim is pretty much automatic, although the looking for work, and the job searches can’t be all that credible. I’ve never seen him wearing the orange vest and picking up cigarette butts downtown. It’s beneath his dignity, one would think. Why work when you can steal?

He doesn’t seem to have any teeth left.

Poor old Zoomer looks like sheer hell when you see him.

I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him to know where I live. I don’t want him asking about my family.

I don’t want to come home one day and find that he’s cleaned me out, or if not him, then it would be somebody else.

At his age, one would think that he is beyond hope, beyond cure, beyond caring any longer what happens to him.

It’s probably true, too.

Was he ever a good man?

Not that I can really recall.

With that guy, it all started when he was about fourteen years old.

And I’m guilty too. Twenty years went by when I was just killing time, trying to stay drunk, or stoned, or just not bothering to try. I was trying to avoid responsibility for my life. Even then, I thought of writing books—I was a crashing bore on the subject, but it just seemed so unlikely.

It was just too hard, ladies and gentlemen.

I don’t care if you pity or condemn Zoomer, who eventually found the meth. It’s cheap, it gets you high, and it kills a lot of pain—that’s what I’m thinking.

And I’ll bet he’s got a lot of pain to kill. He’s got a whole, wasted lifetime of guilt and pain which he will never acknowledge outside of a rehab group therapy session, and probably not even then. He’s never been honest with himself, unless it was part of a ploy to gain sympathy—a ploy to beg, borrow or steal some more money.

Some of these guys are real good with the sob stories. Their dads are always there to bail them out of jail, too.

That must be an interesting conversation.

Eh?

A lot of that money must have come from his own parents.

There but for something—call it luck, call it determination, call it the grace of God if you must, go I—and I know that very well.

It is all too easy to let go and not give a fuck about anything anymore. Or anyone—and I can assure you that he did have a mother, a father, a sister and a brother.

When people don’t respect themselves, you can hardly expect them to respect anyone or anything else. That includes other people's property. It’s all the same to a meth-head.

He had a nice girlfriend, and he had some pretty good friends there for a while.

This is his fate—and that’s okay with me as long as it’s okay with him.

And if you don’t want to hear about my books and stories, that’s okay too.

I don’t need him any more than I need you.

Maybe that’s the difference.

Maybe the poor guy never got pissed off at himself.

Maybe the poor guy never asked the question.

Maybe he never looked inside of himself and found something there that was worthwhile.

Maybe that guy never found any guts.

But I did. I did, ladies and gentlemen. In that sense, even an atheist can be truly blessed.

And I can tell you that there is something better than this.

I will keep going until I find it.

As for you guys, you can do what you want.

It’s not like I give a fucking shit. I got my shit together, it took a while, but it did happen.

No one is going to take that away from me.

END

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addictive_personality