Certainties – Page 54

500

Looks like it’s all about the numbers now. Five hundred can be a tough slog. 500. How many things do you do 500 times? One right after the other? Never, right? What, you’ve kept track? Counted them all? Maybe you should think about that. Think about what you’re doing keeping track of it. But it’s okay. It’s the last chapter. The struggle with numbers is over.

I was on the floor and I wasn’t lying down, but I should have been. Or he should have been. It was 500 and I wanted to kill him and would have except I’m not a killer. I went to get my jacket and walked out of the damn place. Sounds a bit overblown. Maybe it was. The hick, the slovenly white man in shorts with the fat gut, stood there with his mouth open. You hear it everywhere in this town. The sound of silence. Means nothing. It’s night and it’s Vancouver and the testosterone’s flowing.

What a night it’s turning out to be. I’ve never counted 500 of anything before. Certainly not the last time I was doing anything of consequence, and it went on for years. How many 500s is that? 500 + 500 + 500? On and on. Ridiculous. Things you’ve done. Forget it. Not worth remembering. At least not right now.

I wasn’t counting because I didn’t care, but time is shorter now. It’s worth remembering. I’m interested in what I’m doing and how many times I’m doing it. Especially the grind this is, that I thought was behind me. Wally the grinder. He found me again. I hate that guy.

Something like being in prison and waiting to get out, even if you don’t know what prison is like because you’ve never been. Not that one, anyway.

500 times. 500 miles. Galaxie 500. Fortune 500. Indy 500. 500 Episodes. That’s the one I’m always worried about. The 500 episodes of my life and what that’s going to look like.

‘If I’ve said it once I’ve said it 500 times.’ The actual quote is, ‘If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a 1000 times.’ Blab on. It’s over.

It’s just a number. I had to go back to my high school Latin text because I couldn’t remember, and I used to love Latin, what the numeral is for the concept, the number 500, and I wanted to include that. D. It’s D. It was disappointing. I thought 500 meant a lot more than ‘D’. I dumped that idea. Roman numerals are making a comeback. Just see.

Everybody knows MMXIV. It’s a very good year. Sure it is.

500 means something. You first learned it back in arithmetic, probably your best course back then. If you counted enough numbers you got to five hundred. Loved arithmetic. A lot of it was on the back of your old scribblers or note books that they used to hand out, or they magically appeared from your parents or something. Maybe you were forced to buy them yourself. ‘Hilroy’. The tables. All the tables on the backs of the notebooks.

Not only was I unsure if I’d ever find another job, I never wanted any job ever. Not supported by the evidence, tough guy. Same goes for interviews. Despise interviews, but who doesn’t? Everybody’s tough and interviews are something you have to tough out. Why wouldn’t you? Resumes especially. Loathe them. But I had one, sort of.

Honestly. When you start out you can’t conceive of something as huge and ridiculous as 500. That it’s going to happen to you like that.

More important things are at work here, like this special day. Happy birthday!

Stanzl Building

It’s stood here, this iconic advanced waffle iron, all designer concrete, with the peaked top, on a vast scale, since 1974. The Stanzl building. Frank Stanzl. Builder and developer, in any order. Some guy named Vladimir Plavsic architected the thing.

Whatever happened to Frank, anyway? He died. And it’s too bad. He was only 54. It happened 36 years ago. I always thought that was awfully harsh medicine for a guy who managed to put up this massive tribute to form and style. In his own name. To just go off and die like that within a few years of building your 20th Century pyramid. Maybe it was the pressure of all that concrete, custom formed. The man dies but the concrete goes on.

There’s not a lot of people who even know this is the Stanzl building. You won’t see a sign anywhere on the premises, certainly not in the main foyer, that this is indeed the Stanzl building. Stanzl? It’s medical/dental. It’s 805 West Broadway. Grab a taco on your way in. Nobody cares. Not true.

It’s a great building. It’s not going anywhere. It’s unique and you can’t say that about just about any other building put up around here in the last 40 years. I mean, you can. You can say there’s other buildings just as unique, but is it true? But wait. There are no degrees of uniqueness. Something is either unique, or it isn’t. But let’s not get into the semantics. Someone might get hurt. Unique seems to mean something different than it used to. Like, really unique. So, is it unique, or not? Really unique? What exactly do you mean?

Nobody bothers too much about this stuff in construction. Just get on with it and build. It’s still a nice building. I remember standing in the parkade arguing with a foreman.

“I didn’t come here to be a broom jockey,” I told him. “I want to work!”

“You’re right,” he said. “There’s not much left to do around here.”

We left it at that. A bit out of focus.

50

We’re too modest and we know it. We’re too efficient and we take for granted that all entrepreneurial, leading-edge enterprises are as progressive, forward-thinking and enlightened and other clichés as the folks here at samoyeddogs.

We forget how talented we are and think it no big thing to win fifty thousand dollars for a poem. I mean fifty dollars. $50. Did I say $50,000? Money is no object. It’s a good poem, obviously, and it deserved the $50. Needed it too. And there’s at least fifty thousand dollars worth of wisdom and clichés in “The Boys”. Personally I wouldn’t pay a dime over ten thousand. But that’s just me!

That’s right. A few howlers, some idealism expressed, a bracing dash of cynicism and a bit of a mysterious lyric. 16 lines in two 8 line stanzas. Stanza. Love that word. A stanza helps you get organized and that’s great.

The Boys

They have no male role models
Their fathers were gut shot or had their brains blown out
That’s why they’re like that
They have no respect
Because they don’t know what respect is
They’ve never known discipline
They’ve never faced the consequences of their bad behaviour
They behave like imbeciles and it’s not right.

How will they learn if we can teach them?
Because they’re doomed on their own
They’re going down and if we don’t do something
No one will and it’s the world’s loss
And we’re decent, we acknowledge responsibility
And we volunteer because it’s the right thing to do
Even if it’s a waste of time
How will they learn if we can teach them?

50 big ones. You know what happened? The fifty grand got donated. How altruistic! Some organizations, doing important work, exist solely by donation. I know. Hard to believe. Priorities. They can be a little messy at times. All you can do is try and get it right.

I want to thank the panel, the organizers, the judges, and why not while we’re at it deliver a big “Sit!” to all the hounds, be they breed or mongrel, on Hound Hill? You’ve worked hard and made us better. What was that again?

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