Why I Can't Stand Motivational Speakers. Louis Shalako.

Learn to suck your own cock, and maybe try and be a little bit more like me.

Louis Shalako

 

I was drowning one day. I had already gone down twice, kicking my way back up to the surface in pure desperation when something caught my eye.

I saw a man standing on the riverbank. He had a bright and shiny look on his face. He had a stick, and on the end of that stick, there was a big, juicy, T-bone, and he was waving it in my face, mouthing words of encouragement.

Talk about motivation—all thoughts of imminent demise gone, I wanted to kill that man real bad.

Finally floundering ashore, no thanks to you, sir. He tossed the stick and the steak aside, and I chased him down the boardwalk, only to see him climb into a big, long, shiny black car and go zooming off down the road.

I didn’t need motivation, Mister. What I needed was a rope.

Motivational speakers and lottery tickets have much in common. They encourage you to dream. 

For whatever that’s worth…dreams are cheap.

The power of positive thinking is highly overrated. We can sit around thinking positive thoughts all God-damned day long, which achieves nothing except procrastination.

What we need, in order to change a situation, or even our lives, are positive actions.

Mandino: get yourself some nice generalities, e.g., love your customers, for they are sheep.

Motivational speakers know nothing about you, your life or your circumstances. This means that their advice is purely generic. It fits as many individuals, lives and sets of circumstances as possible. In that sense, anyone can be a motivational speaker. All you need is a nice set of generalities.

The people who really need such advice can’t afford the price of admission. The people who can afford the price of admission, have everything they could possibly need and probably don’t need the advice to begin with. For all I care, they can toss and turn all night long, dreaming and sweating over the next billion-dollar start-up.

It’s a lot like religion, and possibly the last legal scam there is.

Just for the record, my mother gave me a copy of Unlimited Power, by Tony Robbins for Christmas one year. I did read it, but then I will read almost anything. I’ve read Dale Carnegie, I’ve read Leo Buscaglia and Og Mandino. I have read the magazines. Success Unlimited comes to mind, the fact is that my mother had dozens, hundreds of books, magazines, tapes, VHS tapes, CDs and all the same stuff in every available format.

When has my mother ever needed motivation? She’s still working, mostly because she wants to, at the grand age of 85. She figures that not only will she live longer, but enjoy a higher quality of life, and this much is probably true—

My mother has never needed motivation, ladies and gentlemen.

An opportunity, maybe, an even break, maybe—but not motivation.

What strikes me, is that if you are looking for positive motivation, a lottery ticket is more escapism than anything else. Also, I can only wonder about all of those books and tapes.

Perhaps if you had saved your money, put it in a bank at almost any kind of interest rate, soon it would grow into something much more useful than shelf after shelf of motivational books, gathering dust and not much good to anyone at that point. You're out there, working your lousy ass off, just so you can fill your shelves with books, tapes, VHS bullshit, attending the seminars and conferences, all produced by the most worthless of human types.

If a pep talk could do anything, anything at all, to change someone’s life, I am surprised that some bright person downtown hasn’t considered paying Tony Robbins to come to town, go down to Rainbow Park, and talk those people into changing their lives.

They could walk barefoot on hot coals, a confidence-trick that goes back millennia, all the way to the fakirs of India and beyond.

What you need is a plan. What you need to do is to take small, incremental steps, for all change is incremental, and a life is a big thing to change.

It’s not quite as easy as handing a million dollars to a loser, one who has experienced zero personal growth as a person, and expecting them to do anything that is particularly different than what they were doing before. They’ll just continue to do all the same things, only more so, and maybe even worse, in some cases.

Buscaglia: Think positive, for I want another Ferrari.

The trouble with change, of course, is that change is hard. It takes hard work, commitment, and more than anything else, time. 

Nothing is going to happen overnight.

That, I think, is why people just give it up and go back to the old, unproductive ways.

If you don’t believe in the power of positive thinking, you can always try the power of negative thinking.

You don’t have to take any positive, or even negative actions at all.

All you have to do is to sit there and think negative thoughts. Work real hard, and try to surround yourself with as many negative-minded people you can find.

It works better than you could ever imagine.

And if you don’t believe me, ask your mother.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris is the latest in The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.

Success Magazine.

Kids Scared Straight:

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Game of Fools. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

This is a not-so-funny story which I only just made up.

There are three guys sitting around a table in the county bucket. Everything is all bolted down in a jail.

The first guy says, “When I got picked up, I had over nineteen thousand in cash, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and three knives, and a set of nunchucks.”

The second guy says, “That’s cool. When I got picked up, I had forty-seven thousand in fentanyl, five or ten in coke, twelve-hun in cash, brass knuckles, and a loaded pellet pistol.”

The third one says, “Ha! That’s nothing. When I got picked up at the Bluewater Bridge, I had fifty keys of methamphetamines and thirty semi-automatic pistols, all Glocks and Colts and Rugers…”

The other two guys are pretty quiet for a minute.

The first guy finally says, “Yeah—yeah. That’s pretty cool.”

The second guy nods. “Yeah—cool, man.”

The funny part is, they really do think it’s cool—even though every one of them is looking at some pretty hard time these days.

It’s not ‘catch and release’ anymore, it’s not a slap on the wrist, and anybody that’s fronted you that stuff isn’t exactly happy about losing their money either. You may have to face them, and explain where all the money and dope went. You may have to face your family, your spouse and your kids, out on bail, and waiting to go back to court where your fate will be determined.

There is no such thing as free dope, and it is only a matter of time before you get caught.

The police are gathering criminal intelligence all the time. There are cameras everywhere.

Your own neighbours might get involved and drop a dime. One of your buddies may be facing a little trouble himself, or herself, and one way to keep their own backsides out of jail might be to let them have someone else—you, for example.

You cannot run a household on the proceeds of petty crime. I’ve known people who tried to do it, guys and girls I grew up with. They never succeeded, although they might have had it all right if they were still living in their parents’ basement. They put in more hours in a typical week than any regular worker ever had to. They were constantly on the go, and it was a lifestyle of at least some choice.

Some were also children of abuse or neglect.

I found the obituary of an old buddy. He passed away at the age of 62. Poor guy got into it young. He was a thief already, which kept an energetic teenager in beer, pot, and all the fast food he could eat. All it took back then was a bent coat hanger and a kind of persistence. Or an unlocked door, an open window.

Over the course of time, someone turned him onto speed. After a particularly good score, he must have tried it, liked it, and what started off as an occasional treat, became a daily habit. No one was more impressed than I, when he got himself a job. A real, forty-hour a week job. By then, he had a wife and two kids, and he did stick with it. For a while.

Last time I saw him, he was on a bicycle, probably stolen or even just found by the side of the road. His jaw was going back and forth from side to side, he had one tooth sticking up out of the side of the lower jaw. The rest were mostly gone. The eyes were shifting, even the front wheel was going from side to side in a kind of spastic, involuntary manner.

He was hurting and it was obvious he needed a hit real bad. And the only way to get it was to make some money, the good, old-fashioned way, that is to say by stealing something, almost anything, from somebody else, somewhere.

No one would rent to him, and the bit of welfare he might have gotten was never going to be enough.

Funny thing was, there was always someone, a very lonely woman with a habit, an old buddy, who would take him in. It never lasted, and I reckon he slept on a park bench as often as not—he sometimes lived at the homeless shelter, if he wasn’t too messed up on arrival.

As a young guy, he thought the dope dealers were his friends.

They were the only friends he had—the worst kind of friends.

Selling hard dope is a game for fools.

As for myself, I avoid you people like the plague.

 

END

 

Note. This story is not intended as a commentary on legal bud shops or bud shops on indigenous sovereign lands.

  

Louis Shalako has books and stories available in ebook and audio from Google Play. The Handbag’s Tale is the short story that inspired The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series and is currently free.

The Pusher, Steppenwolf. (Youtube)

Criminal Intelligence. (CBC Aug 18/24)

Images. Top: Morguefile. Lower: free with trial membership from a stock company which I have already forgotten.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

One Hundred Years of War. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

 

From 1337 to 1453, the small, poor nation of England plundered her stronger neighbour France. While the ordinary archer had small chance of getting rich, they had a fairly good chance of getting paid. The rich, got even richer. Assuming they survived.

Analogies run dry, once details are examined. There are modern parallels. We don’t plunder these days. Once we get past ideologies, differences of language, culture and religion, most modern wars are fought for economic reasons. World War One was a war of mercantilist empires. All the cheap natural resources, cheap labour. A captive market.

It was irresistible.

Nazi Germany under Hitler looted Europe to sustain a war of territorial, economic and political expansion.

On the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin guaranteed the borders of the newly independent Ukraine, including the Crimea. In 2014, Russia under Vladimir Putin seized the Crimea. The naval base at Sevastopol is strategic, the basic reasons are economic—think vast reserves of oil and gas under the ground and under the Black Sea, as well as agricultural and mineral production.

In strategic terms, a bastion against the liberal and democratic West.

The Donbas was strategic in WW II, a centre of energy and industrial production, as important then, as it is now. Russia is as anxious to destroy it as they are to possess it. It’s difficult to see Ukraine as an economic threat, with her smaller population.

In terms of productivity, the country was making gains while all Russia could offer was more oligarchs, more economic aristocrats. Ukraine is a moral threat, leaning to western Liberal democracy and seeking to join the European Union and the NATO alliance.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has gone on since the formation of the state in 1948. The Balfour Declaration provided for a homeland for the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

The first Arab-Israeli war was fought in 1948. Five Arab nations attacked and were defeated—with help from the U.S. and others. That’s 76 years of off-and-on warfare. Considering the present war in Gaza, they are well on their way to a hundred years of war. It will never end. The two-state solution is an illusion. Neither side will respect it, bearing in mind hatred, the desire for revenge; the irreconcilable goals of either side.

Even if Hamas, the Palestinian Authority on the one side, and the militant right-wing government of Israel on the other, should suddenly become moderate and pacific in their demands and expectations, they hardly control the more extreme elements in the political environment. Israeli settlers, in a Zionist movement, will continue to expropriate by force, Palestinian lands and their victims will continue to resist by whatever means at their disposal, including what will be labeled ‘terrorism’.

People have the right to resist oppression, tyranny and expropriation of that which is theirs.

Is this really about religion, is this really about good versus bad, or is it just about seizing the land. Gaza is 365 kilometres in area. Isn’t it really about exploitation of something that doesn’t belong to us in the first place? The finer nuances of Biblical theory escape us. Truth is, we just don’t care. We deplore the results of war on our screens.

The two-state solution is unrealistic. Intelligent people espouse it, including the Honourable Marilyn Gladu, Member of Parliament for Sarnia-Lambton. Will the state of Israel accept Palestinians as equal citizens, of a free, open and democratic society, entitled to justice, social benefits, the rights of free people under the awesome majesty of the state and its promise of equity before the law for all persons?

No.

The one-state solution doesn’t seem very likely either, and that really doesn’t leave much else.

Russia will run out of steam. Vladimir Putin is a mortal being. Eventually, he must pass.

The next guy might be worse. Smaller states around the Baltic and the periphery of the former U.S.S.R. have much to fear from this new Imperial phase of Putin’s Russia.

Meanwhile, the price of flour has gone up. The price of vegetable oil is up, the price of corn, wheat, oilseeds and animal feeds, fertilizers, have gone up. The price of fuel has risen, or stayed high, with Houthi rebels attacking ships in the Red Sea, bound for the Suez Canal, in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The U.S. sends military aid to Israel. Iran supports Hamas. Natural gas supplies are threatened in Europe. Germany is bringing coal-fired power plants back online, not good when the reality of global warming is apparent.

You and your family are victims, living in a peaceful and law-abiding country and minding your own business. Forces from elsewhere engage in hacking attacks simply to disrupt us—to discourage us, to make life tougher for us all.

It shows up in our grocer’s receipts, at the gas pump, our next tax bill, and in the daily headlines.

We read the news, watch television. Israel pounds Gaza, the home of 2.3 million people. Russia and the Ukraine exchange futile blows. Somebody, somewhere, will have some kind of inspiration, and let the rest of the world have some peace and quiet for a change.

Canadians are truly blessed. We can change the channel or maybe just turn the thing off for a while.

END

The author reached out to the Honourable Marilyn Gladu MP for comment, no reply has been received at time of publication.

Louis Shalako’s audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, is presently free from Google Play.

What are Israel’s Plans for the West Bank. (CBC)

The West Bank: Israel's Other Genocidal War. (Al Jazeera) 

Extremist Settlers Seize Palestinian Lands. (BBC)

Images: Public Domain, creative licenses or fair use.

Thank you for reading.

Grandma Shalako Never Worked a Day in Her Life. Louis Shalako.

The late Irene Ryan as Grandma Shalako.

Louis Shalako

What if a person had never worked in their life? Grandma Shalako's job was the house, the kitchen, the bedding, the laundry. 

Cleaning the bathroom. 

She raised eight squalling kids in a three-bedroom house, and she was a very good Catholic. 

When her youngest, my dad, Big Frank came along she was in her forties.

He was her little boy, which sort of grated on him. When he told her he was getting married, she threw her head back and laughed. She thought he must be joking. He was still flying model airplanes, and going off to Scout Jamborees, perhaps that was it.

At some point her job was looking after my Uncle Ed, who had taken over the business when grandpa passed away. This is almost funny. Turning 65, one day there was a cheque in the mail from the Canada Pension folks. She was afraid of it. It had to be explained to her. Someone helped her open a bank account, probably Ed. When she died, every freaking penny of it was still in the bank. She'd never had a cent of her own, unless she’d won it at cards down at the Masonic Lodge. I believe she enjoyed taking money off of all the nice Protestant ladies. Basically, Ed gave her household money and wrote all the checks and stuff like that.

Born about 1898, Eugenie had a grade six education if that. Coming from the Hull, Quebec area, her English was very good, yet she still said “Please pass the pommes de terres,” when she wanted the mashed potatoes. Hull is just across the river from Ottawa, and even today, there is still a lot of intercourse between the two cities. The Great Depression put a lot of people out of work and maybe Sarnia just had better prospects.

I don’t think they were running from the law or anything like that.

Debt, maybe—but not the law.

Taking over the family business at 17 years of age, Uncle Ed had, at best, a grade nine or ten education. With eight children, one would imagine Eugenie liked sex—pretty much everybody does, and in the end, she might have gotten a little tired of it. When grandma died, each of her eight children got a cheque from the estate for $700.00 or so, and Ed inherited the house and the business. We can put that down to sweat equity—he’d built the business up to an extent, kept it going and paid for the house and all other expenses for many years.

Yeah, they’d been paying $25.00 a month in rent for the longest time, so Ed made the owner an offer and bought the place for three or four grand, which sounds ludicrous these days, but those were very different times.

Nowadays, the two-income family has become the norm, perhaps even a necessity. There have always been single parents, in the Depression they scrabbled for their living as best they could. In a time where women particularly, didn’t get much higher education, it was a challenge. Also, in the Depression, there weren’t enough jobs to go around to begin with, and this probably went double for unskilled women.

Good for delivering tombstones...

My grandfather sold and installed monuments. Tombstones, ladies and gentlemen, using planks, rollers and brute labour to get them into the back seat area of a 1928 Hudson. The compressor for sandblasting was a screw-in fitting which utilized an old Model-T Ford engine, which would somehow keep running with one cylinder providing pressure for the sandblasting, used to cut names and dates into the granite slabs. With portability, the date of decease of a second spouse for example, could be done in situ, that is to say right in the cemetery after the stone had been erected.

It must have been a wonderful thing, for Uncle Ed to finally get an actual pickup truck, and a set of chain-falls for the garage where the work was done. For a young kid, always hungry for money, it was something of a thrill, to work on a Saturday, putting up a tombstone in a Lambton cemetery, and earning a whopping five dollars for the trouble.

Ed used to sing, as he drove along.

“Every little breeze, seems to whisper Louise, the birds and the bees, seem to whisper Louise—”

The sort of thing you never forget. If you have to have a crazy Uncle, there’s nice crazy, and then there are other kinds. Ed was a nice kind of crazy.

There is a kind of heritage there.

Our family has a reputation for hard work and fine Italian craftsmanship—which is pretty good considering we’re just a bunch of Frenchmen, une bande de foutus français.

The past really is a foreign country, but at least I understand the language.

 

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon. The audiobook is free with membership. Click on the author’s name to see the full list.

Louise. Maurice Chevalier. (Youtube)

Here’s a rather stylish air compressor based on the Ford Model A.

Thank you for reading.