Stanzl Building

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.

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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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Mary Jane You Are Reborn Hard

I was just thinking of that.  Reading again and hearing again about the outfall, the continuing developing story, the “strange and terrible saga”, the weird turnaround for cannibis sativa on the greatest planet in the solar system, Colorado.  How things are going now that Washington State has developed new ideas about right and wrong.  And that’s strong, followers.  That’s strong medicine.  There’s something wonderful about America.  I wish someone would figure out what it is.  But it’s out there.  It’s out there.

I remember when a “lid” was seven dollars.  $7.  It wasn’t bad.  It was all right.  It was all there was and when you bought your tenth bag you got one free.  All the dope was sort of flaky, not sticky.  It was Mexican marijuana, unless it was from around Powell River and some of those places where the pot grew like Christmas trees.

Thai-stick.  This was deadly stuff.  You could.  You really could.  Get interested in throwing a stupid thing like a “Frisbee” for way too long.  It came on little four inch bamboo sticks with a bamboo strand holding the goods together.  It was good.  And it came from a place called “Thailand”.  That was an exotic country and you felt cool, and really wrecked, and it was new.

Thai-stick was a lot more like the excellent stuff that’s around today.  It blew your head off.  I mean that figuratively.  Figuratively.  BC bud.  Pretty darn famous as the best.  So proud.

The beastly bud mostly doesn’t grow in the ground as far as I’ve heard.  Never been in a modern grow-op.  All I know is I get my stuff from a gentleman who has good stuff.  I swear by grass.  It’s nice and green.  I like the look.  There’s nothing like a brilliant patch of green grass in the sun.

I feel sorry for all the people who were damaged by the law because of sweet Mary Jane.  That’s right.  You can talk about absurdities, but if you have to live them, and suffer, Mary didn’t know anything about it.  I’m just a plant.  A weed, darn it, that grows in the darn ground.  I’m not going to jail, or submit to some sort of bullcrap fine.  I’m Mary Jane!

Are there people still in jail in the great USA for possession of weed?  Ah, they probably did more than that.  But I remember those fantastical tales of some poor Texan getting 20 years or something for pot.  Great, cruel state of Texas.  That was the story.  Sorry about that, prisoner.  Born in the wrong time.

Weed shops are growing like bakeries.  It does need controlling.  But by the good guys.  And girls.  Time and again it’s been shown that there’s nothing worse than something getting out of control.

The anti-weed brigades have retired or died off.  They got smoked out.  Why couldn’t they realize a lot of things are just a passing fancy?  Weed may die out.  But it shouldn’t be illegal.

Weeds

“I wonder what they do in there?”  Now, come on.  1 hour parking?  You gotta be kidding.  Oh, oh.  I see.  It’s just a “dispensary”.  I have to check this place out.

 

 

With apologies to Gustav Hasford