Real Change Is Incremental. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Real Change is Incremental.

 

If you moved to France, or Alaska, or Timbuktu, that is one big change, all at once. And yet, you would still be the same person, you’re just in a different location. You would adapt, but then you wouldn’t have much choice. Some of those changes might not be all that welcome, and learning a whole new language and culture would be a big challenge.

What if you stayed in the same old place? What if you stayed in the same old place, and what if that was kind of bugging you, and you acknowledged that you needed to make some changes? Perhaps even some big changes.

All real change is incremental. It takes a lot of small changes, very small in fact, over time, and sometimes it takes a very long time, before any real results can be seen.

In a previous story, On Frugality and Poverty Thinking, I talked about how I wanted to paint my apartment, which was getting pretty grubby after nine years of occupancy.

The trouble, of course, is that it’s a good idea to talk to the landlord. They might even say no. It takes fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of tools and materials, all of which have to come up three flights of stairs, all of which takes thirty or forty hours of labour…to slap a coat of paint on heavily-stained walls and to see it all come bleeding back through in a very short time.

And it’s a big change.

It all started off innocently enough. I took some spray cleaner, and did the experiment. I took a sponge, and some paper towels and I just tried to see if I could get some of that goop off of one small section of wall. The concern there, was what if it’s not working and you have to quit, and there would still be those swish marks on the wall where you have just moved it around a bit.

Yeah, but I already had that—I could hardly have made it any worse.

I could hardly make it any worse...

Quite frankly, I have tried to clean here and there a few times, and it seemed as if I was just pushing the grease around, although at least something might have come off. Yet it seemed to work fairly well this time around. It took about four (rather large) bottles of spray cleaner, and about four or five rolls of paper towels and a bit of Comet Cleanser, and a cheap sponge or two.

I did the whole job for less than forty bucks…all it took was time.

And effort, and I never missed a day, an hour and a half to two hours a day.

That, is really all it took.

And now, there is no longer any need to paint my apartment.

And I probably won’t wait nine years to do it again, either. And if I did paint, there’s a lot less crap to bleed through that fresh, new paint, right? It’s not going to need five coats of Killz or Zinsser stain-busting primer first.

Now that I know how freaking easy it is—

***

I did a half-hour of work the first day, and then I had to sit there at my writing desk for the rest of the day, with my eyes straying back to that one clean patch from time to time. The next day, I did maybe an hour and a half—and it was like my arm hurt a bit, like it was going to fall off or something, and yet I could see progress.

My arms never did fall off, and that’s a good thing because I still need them.

It took three sessions to do just one short wall across the front of the apartment, one with a window and a patio door. The square footage is not that great.

Looking around, it’s a pretty big job, so I focused exclusively on the living room and the dining nook. I started off with small sections, just trying to complete them, one at a time.

Having taken a little walk around the apartment, I counted fourteen empty light sockets, there’s another example. I bought five bulbs first time around. I bought four more as I washed walls. I spent two and a half weeks washing walls, which also involved moving furniture. The thing snowballs, to the effect that having pulled out a wall unit, a couch, a fridge or a stove, now it’s time to wash the floor as well. And having washed one part of the floor, it becomes immediately obvious that you might was well go on and wash the rest of it.

Now it’s time to wash the windows, and the door frames and the doors, and the bedroom walls, and the hallway, and the bathroom ceiling…every fucking bit of it was incremental, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s not even done yet.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I went out and bought a new shower curtain. Six dollars. I bought five more light bulbs…they’re less than a dollar each. We have spares in the cupboard. I just bought a couple of night-lights. Think about the psychology. I get up in the middle of the night to pee, and what do I see? Yes, I see that little bluish light in the bathroom. I see something else, too.

Stella, one of our interns here at Long Cool One Books.

Change.

I see change, and change is good. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I see a new bath mat, ($4.50, Dollarama), I see three new wash cloths, ($1.75), I see a new pair of shoes in the closet and maybe even some new socks and underwear in there too.

Looking into our crystal ball, I can see a couple of new towels in the near future. I can see myself pulling down these horrible old curtains and taking them on a little trip to the laundromat. There’s nine years of nicotine in those, and that’s just a fact.

It isn’t even all that expensive, especially as I don’t have to do it all at once. Just for background, I’ve just gotten off of ODSP, disability, after thirty years. Old Age Security and Canada Pension Plan, GIS and all of that results in a pretty substantial raise, which should tell you a little something about the Ontario Disability Support Program. The point is, we’re just a little bit scared to spend money, what with it being so fucking precious all of the time. The surplus is not large, and it could be squandered fairly quickly as well…by this time next week, ladies and gentlemen, I swear to God that I will probably have little wicker bowls full of potpourri, set out here and there, on the back of the toilet tank for example. I'll have them sitting on little lace doilies from Dollarama.

And it will be well.

I want to buy one of those plug-in air fresheners. Then, when I come home from work, the place doesn’t stink like dead tobacco smoke, or the bacon grease on the walls, or old-man smell coming off the bed sheets and pillow cases.

I deserve that much, but then I am prepared to do the work, and to spend the four bucks or whatever.

When the time comes, I’m going to take this old rag of a winter coat, I’m going to put it in the fire pit out behind my mother’s place and I’m going to burn it. Just one more little change, right…I absolutely promise to take a picture and tell you beautiful people all about it.

Right?

And that will be a very good day indeed.

 

END

 

On Frugality, and Poverty Thinking.

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two. The Great Filter Queen Caper. Louis Shalako.

Photo is in the public domain.

Louis Shalako

All the names in this story have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. These are real people, many of whom have been apprehended, for one thing or another, and, over the course of time, been charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, presumably paying some penalty for their crimes. In those cases, they have paid their debt to society, which of course leaves out the fact that they really only got popped for about one in a thousand of their petty little crimes—and some not so petty.

People also have the right to forget, and to be forgotten. We also have the right to forgive, to forget, and maybe move forward and make something more positive out of the shambles of our lives. The statute of limitations has run out long ago, and some of us, at least, finally did grow up.

So much for the disclaimer.

***

McNuggets was a thief, a con-man, and a fraud artist. Like many a fraud, he was personable enough. Good looks, a good brain, a bit of charm was very useful in his line of work.

Poor old McNuggets was on the prowl one day, whether on foot or on a bicycle is unknown. One of his little specialties was theft from automobiles. Back in the day, not every vehicle had an onboard security system. A bent coat hanger was enough to enter most locked vehicles. Some of these guys had plenty of practice. In the occasional case, where a vehicle had an alarm system, when the blaring horn went off, thieves either grabbed what they could—what they could see, or they would just take off at a dead run, or, as often as not, grab the bike and try and cover as much ground as possible. A wallet sitting in the console, or a woman who leaves her purse in the car while she just ran into the store for a minute, were bread and butter to these guys.

On this particular occasion, McNuggets found a set of keys laying on the ground, behind a commercial building. Someone had dropped their keys. A fairly bright guy, McNuggets stopped and picked them up. Two keys were from a Ford automobile, there were house and other keys on there as well. With a bit of traffic coming and going, McNuggets pocketed the keys and kept going. Back then, he would have been thinking about breaking and entering as much as anything else. The problem with the house would be to find out where it was. The problem with a business, would be to unlock and then kill the alarm within a very short time-frame. I’m sure he would have thought all of that. Yes, McNuggets had a very good, if slightly-criminal, brain.

He came back later, possibly even days later. It was dark this time, not broad daylight.  

And there it sat.

This was a medium blue, Ford Taurus station wagon, off the street, behind the building, and it was locked. He could see boxes in the back of the vehicle, which had the rear seat folded flat. Script on the sides of the boxes said Filter Queen and McNuggets had hit the jackpot; if only he had a plan. One, very expensive vacuum-cleaner would be a pretty good score. Sure enough, one key fit the lock. If he had a bike, he might have just abandoned it, (it would likely be a stolen bike anyways), but he was most likely on foot—he had a set of car keys after all.

He wasn’t really known as a car thief, and one wonders if he even had any contacts for the disposal of such a vehicle, probably not in my opinion. He would have gone straight there. Otherwise, one has to hide a stolen car, and you really can’t do that at your folk’s house. So, knowing the salesman or manager must be in the building, he hops in, fires her up and gets the machine out of there with a minimum of fuss and bother.

His problems were not over. He only has so much time. He grabs one vacuum cleaner, an upright or something fairly light and portable, parking on a side-street, half a block or more away, and he sells it to a buddy for a hundred bucks and a gram of coke. Or whatever. When he comes out, there’s no one around and the car is still sitting there. And in a move of sheer, fucking brilliance, he takes it to the Bluewater Health parking lot. He pulls up to the drop-bar, pushes the button, and gets a little ticket to put on the dashboard of the vehicle. The bar raises, and he drives on in. He locks her up, takes the keys and walks away.

Once he has a little time to think about it, he gets spooked—he’s done time before, and this is grand theft auto. And he never goes back. What he did do, which is typical for these guys, was to tell someone about it. That’s a funny thing about cocaine—a couple little tokes on the crack pipe and you’re paranoid as all fucking hell.

***

So, this is where I come in. Swimmy, calls me up. We hung out back then. Swimmy had a good source of red and black Lebanese hash. We went back years.

And he had this idea. What he did not have was a car. You can probably see where this is going. All I had to do was to pick him up and drive him. Let him out, where he is just one of many people, coming and going from the hospital. Right during visiting hours, right? He opens the Ford with a coat hanger, grabs a vacuum, locks her up again, chucks it into the trunk, very large and capacious, of my old man’s Volvo. Off we go to sell the vacuum to his brother-in-law or somebody. Swimmy had clearly been doing a bit of fast-talking of his own. With free parking for two hours, it didn’t cost me a cent to go in, park, wait three minutes. You could unlock the trunk but leave it closed. Swimmy was quick, I will give him that. Back in a jiffy. I take a quick look and head for the exit. No one gave us a second glance, but then everyone has their own problems.

Bad as that sounds, even stupid, really, we actually went back two or three times. There were a hell of a lot of vacuum cleaners in that Taurus. My mother had one of the floor type models, (some of those guys had some high-pressure sales tactics), and while it had a lifetime warranty, the price of a Filter Queen was astronomical.

One day the Taurus was gone, and the party was over.

And that, was the great Filter Queen caper of somewhere in the late eighties or early nineties.

***

One of the issues with smoking pot back then, was that you had to go to a criminal to get it. Some of those guys worked harder at not working than they ever did at working at anything useful, or anything that might represent something with a future. Some of them were real wheelers and dealers.

McNuggets, oddly enough, had a trade, one which he’d learned in jail. It took some time to learn that you simply cannot maintain a household on the proceeds of petty crime. Some of them guys never learned it, and some of them are either dead, missing, or doing hard time for something somewhere. They didn't know when to quit. They just kept getting in, deeper and deeper...

That’s their problem, as far as I am concerned.

Interestingly, more than one of them eventually realized that you could just leave the $28.97 in cash in a wallet or purse. Why not take an exclusive credit card, American Express, Diner’s Club or something, one the victim did not use every day? And what about this tiny slip of paper, with four digits written on it, and gee, I wonder if that isn’t the PIN number for this here debit card. You don’t have to go into the bank, just find a bank machine and give it a try. With the cash still there, folks might not know they’d been had for days—and by then, it would be too late.

...just a bug on the wall, sometimes...

This is when guys like McNuggets learned to dress well but casual, shave, be polite, say yes, sir, no, sir, and thank you, Ma’am. This is when they learned to lease a car with one stolen credit card and then head two or three hundred kilometres up the road and do some real shopping with a handful, literally a handful, of stolen credit cards under different names. Back then you had to sign a slip. Human nature being what it is, retail staff virtually never looked at the signature. A sale is a sale, as the salesmen say. It was no skin off their nose.

What with food, booze, cocaine, pot, anything they wanted, really, I reckon McNuggets and one or two others (there is nothing like teamwork, eh), burned through several hundred thousand dollars in a year. Sheer madness, when you realize all the money that went through their hands and yet they never had a fucking thing to show for it. It was a little too easy come, and a little too easy, go. They’d make the most amazing score, two days later, they didn’t have a pot to piss in.

And it was only a matter of time, before there came the knock at the door and sure enough, they’re looking at another bit of time in the county bucket, or a provincial or federal prison.

To be a bug on the wall, and to just listen to the conversation was interesting as all hell, possibly even educational.

That’s not to say that I have an excuse, because I don’t. I was just young, ladies and gentlemen. And maybe just a little bit desperate.

For someone who wanted to write, even back then, it really was fascinating.

END

Poor old Louis has books and stories available fromAmazon. What the hell, its honest work.

See his art, available from ArtPal.

Check out My Criminal Memoir, Part One.

 

This audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, is presently free from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.