Crowley's Law

From and old Dispatch, here.

Fuck the fucking moonbase. There is nothing there for us, despite what the ridiculous ‘40s-vintage helium-mining fantasies they’re spinning say. Here is a complete list of the moon’s benefits to humanity: it looks nice.

I mean, it really, really looks nice. Hanging there, waning away, outshining the stars on a cloudless night. Its only competition is the orange glowing steamcloud cloud of the pulp mill on the horizon.

“Come on, dad! Just do it!”

I snap back from space. Tough-guy Jody’s being goaded by the apple of his pugilistic eye into flipping off the deck. He peers over the edge like it’s the lip of a canyon rather than a six-inch drop into five feet of snow. Sense and sobriety do battle with whisky and lifelong daredevil instinct across his nervous-smiling face until his wife (or whatever; I just got here, myself) puts in her $0.02:

“For fuck’s sake, Jody! You’ve got a good job; don’t break your fucking back!”

FLOOMP into the snowbank, a perfectly cushioned backflop. Sometimes all it takes is the concern of a good woman to remind a man of his party responsibilities ... and these people take their responsibilities seriously.

02-23-2007 – Stabtown

So, I just had a dude pull a knife on me for the first time.

Walking home from work down 104th street, right by the venerable Lingnan, through a bit of urban wastespace that’s spent decades within “Coming Soon!” distance of some kind of glistening downtown revival, this kid purpose-striding up the street southbound calls me out, Hey Buddying me as to whether I “got any brick.”

A very vague term, but in every possible sense the answer is “no, man.” Busy cellphone-talking some intense shit with my girl, I walk on.

“Don’t you fuckin’ walk away from me!”

Uh-oh. I keep on walking and talking, approaching sneakers krrking on the winterlong snowpack behind me, until I feel the slap on my shoulder. I turn to face a kid who couldn’t have been over 16, his mouth pursed and turned down into the kind of battle-scowl that looks like its wearer is about to cry, doing that loud tough-guy nose-breathing.

“I asked you a fuckin’ question. You don’t got any brick?”

“No, man; I don’t have anything.”

“Some guys didn’t stop you and sell you some shit?”

"No, nobody sold me anything.”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me. Don’t you fucking lie to me.”

That’s when the knife comes out, pulled from the left-hand pocket of his coat. He doesn’t brandish it or wave it in may face, just holds it there. There’s nothing romantic or picturesque about it – it’s not “wicked”, it doesn’t “glint” – it’s a utensil this kid happens to have, and he’s showing it to me.

I don’t really know why I’m not shit-scared at this moment – that very morning, somebody got knifed on the street in front of my the building where I work; some office dudes watched through binoculars as the blood-pools cooled – but at no time do I feel like this kid is going to knife me. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel alone -- I still have my phone clamped to my ear with my fiancée on the other end; can the cellphone oblivion that turns drivers into blind/deaf missile pilots numb one to an imminent knife attack? Maybe it’s the false protection of “broad daylight”.
More likely it’s pose of the punk himself, and the status of his little knife. The moment he pulled it out, he didn’t get harder or tougher or braver; it was almost like he was embarrassed, like he’d played his hand too early and knew it. His eyes lost their tough-guy focus and started to wander around my face. The knife became part of a dorky uniform, a lame formality.

What is it with this town and knives? We’ve gone stab-happy. I suppose that from a global – or even merely North American -- perspective our emergent stabbiness is kind of quaint; we’re in the Stone (Stainless Steel?) Age of mindless civil violence, country cousins trying to imitate our way to that dreamed-of “World Class” by being all hard with a blade. Or maybe the filthy greed-flood of dirty money that runs through our streets and the arrogance of zero unemployment have turned us stone-cold sociopathic – how can we all be in the same boat when half the city is riding on his-n-hers jet skis?

It’s going to be a stabbin’ madhouse around here when the goddamn downtown arena gets built – and it will get built, have no doubt; the same sort of narrative of inevitability is being woven for it, courtesy of Edmonton’s awesome cabal of moneymen, boosterists, homers and press lackeys, as the one that preceded the invasion of Iraq. I see an apocalypse, friends; once we trudge through the next few bastard years of false choices, false promises, false threats and false estimates and emerge 800 million dollars poorer and one [YOUR NAME HERE CHEAP] Centre richer, downtown will become a drunken post-game carnival of bloody daggers… at least until the also-inevitable 100-million-dollar CCTV public surveillance web goes online.

Anyway, about this punk kid and his knife. I finally manage to convince him I’m neither carrying drugs nor concealing the location of the “some guys” that are. He nods and tucks his threat-utensil back into his pocket.

“OK. Peace out, brother.”

"Yeah. Take care of yourself.”

And off we go on our separate ways, two perfectly civil Edmontonians.

01-29-2007 – the Edutorium

Man… other than the brief moments of democracy that’ve taken me back into the power-polished wood, multi-sport courtlines and tempera-painted paper banners of various gymnasia, it’s been years since I’ve been in such a schooly place. Edmonton Public Schools’ education centre on Kingsway, Temple of Teaching, high-water mark of pre-Klein institutional investment. Nowadays, this would all be ATCO portables… or a million twenty-dollar cheques… or a Ski-Doo dealership…

Wah! See how quickly the teacher-vibe kicks in? The cast-concrete of the Centre’s atrium plaza has been steeped in a decade-and-a-half of cutback frustration and tooth-and-claw Unionism. I’ve only been in the place for one day, four hours of light classtime teaching Grade 5 & 6 kids the basics of ghost-story writing (three pulp paperbacks hacked out on contract make me the expert, right?), and already I’m burnt out and identity-confused, jittered with caffeine and post-performance adrenaline, wondering how my little honorarium will affect my pension profile…

Teachers, with shaking hands I salute you! I’d always known – well, accepted the received knowledge -- that teaching was “a hard job” but never really had a taste of it until today. How do you do it? What does it take to get through period after period, day after day, year after year of looking out at those terrifying little faces in all their confounding variety: the slackjawed little drones, the razor-sharp keeners, the daydreamers, the superstars, the friendless, the insufferable shits you’d want to strangle if they weren’t so goddamn funny, the lost ones hiding miles behind eyes full of enough trouble to sink a heart?

You do it with coffee and cigarettes, from what I remember and what I’ve seen today – though there seems to be a lot less tobacco use now than when I was rocking the post-boom portables and Mrs. Trout would come back from her prep period with breath like mentholized dogshit. Also, there’s the rapturous golden vision of Retirement Day to keep a teacher going; lunchtime is still animated by pension conversations, brag/bitching on the possibilities and pitfalls of maximizing the material comforts of a well-earned permanent vaction.

And, yeah, I see how the kids are motivators in themselves. Granted, my sessions today have been the Disney Experience of teaching, “Pirates of the Caribbean” to twenty years under Captain Morgan, but I can glimpse the reality. The shit these kids come up with, in just half an hour of longhand burst-writing -- just amazing! Our topic was “Writing Ghost Stories," so I expected some of the mildly macabre schoolyard spookiness – it’s heartnening to know that, after all these years, every single schoolkid knows the legend of Bloody Mary – but the Craven-on-acid outlines these kids were dropping were something else.

“The Chainsaw Manicure”: A guy goes for a haircut, but he’s drunk and goes into a nail parlor by mistake and gets the full treatment. Driven mad by his accidental feminization, he swears chainsaw revenge on all estheticians and ladies with acrylic gels.

“Untiltled”: A necromancer creates a half-zombie, half-vampire, half-werewolf creature (it’s so weird it defies mathematical laws) to guard his money. When he goes to get some of his money (to pay back the fellow necromancer who taught him how to make the zomvamwolf) his own creature kills him and drains his spirit and uses that power to escape into outer space.

“A Night in the School”: M’kaela, Jason, Mercedes, Kayeley, Heather, Jesika, Tyler, Michael D. and Michael R. decide to spend the night in the school. The rest is a mystery; the session ended before the author could get past introducing her characters.

“The FART!!!!”: A guy calls his wife over and (“Beware,” the author interjects, “the next is cotent not sutable for chidren!”) FAAAARRRRTs! on her. So she kills him with a butcher knife and he comes back as a farting ghost. FARRRRT!

And so on. Today was such a blur of dark basements, insane asylums, evil prisons (lots of evil prisons), cursed sombreros, soul-sucking, ritual murder, torture, demonic possession, satan-worshipping, crying little girls in white gowns, knives, swords, power tools, power failures, super powers and characters with all the terrible names with which parents these days are saddling their kids that I can’t keep it all straight. Pretty much every kid there had seen every SAW movie, and one session got derailed for ten minutes in a heated discussion over who would win in a fight between Freddy and Jason.

I hate to say it, but that was a high point for me, getting the chance to moderate a modern revisitation of a discussion my friends and I originated when we were in Grade 5 ourselves. It made me think that if I were to change careers, maybe I’d go back to school and…

…and, what am I thinking? No way! Not for all the job security and summer vacation in the world. I’m a coffee-drenched, trembling wreck, spiritually drained, craving a smoke, a nap and a drink, in whatever order I happen to stumble into them. I’ll leave the work of civilizing this horror-soaked generation of hellraisers to the halitotic hard-cases who can handle it.