OP Miner’s sometimes metaphorical rant documenting the obscenity of some of the pay cycles in the current public aristocracy smacks of sincerity. Indeed, you will know obscenity when you see it, and certain job descriptions tickling six figures and up do fail the smell test. Though I have never met Mr. Miner, I think I can safely make the leap that he is not a public servant, or at least not yet. An anger seeps out with his comments, but it is really fear, isn’t it: fear that the whole system is unraveling while those in charge pander to their self interests first, and their employers’ second. Thus, and I believe it was de Tocqueville’s observation, democracy does contain the seeds of its own destruction.

The historical flow seems to point to an almost certain evolution that tyranny follows democracy, or dictatorship the republic, that the freedoms usually enjoyed become inevitably entangled in rights, laws, exemptions, entitlements and, as our lyrical friends might suggest, shite, which really means greed, doesn’t it? Now we are there. Banks are bankrupt, economies on the slippery slope, deficits are norm, budgets are bust, and yet demands persist as if the only logistical problem is the availability of ink to print more money.

And leadership is the issue. Parliaments were formed to control an aristocracy which would spend our gold pieces on their indulgences. When the parliaments, congresses, councils and boards debase to the level of spending first on themselves, they have become the antithesis of their own creation, and there is only one recourse to control them: throw the bums out.

Or be quiet. People, cynically or even typically, deserve the government they have. I said that.

In the locker room, anything goes. Salty language, strange smells and infantile behavior - some of hockey’s best games are played behind closed doors. Stepping onto the ice and playing hockey requires timing, a bit of strength, some lung power and an overall physical exertion that both exhilarates and exhausts, even when it looks like the Keystone Copsroutine I regularly turn it into.

It’s a highly athletic game, and only those who are or who aspire to be athletic can understand the high you get from playing hockey. Having said that, some of the secondary aspects of the game are nearly as enjoyable, particularly if you’re involved in any brand of hockey attached to either a rink or a community league hall (like my Wednesday-night gang).

For instance, if you enjoy salty and inventive ungrammatical language, a medley of disagreeable smells, undeserved verbal abuse, zinger one-upmanship and generally infantilized behaviour, I suspect you would enjoy one key aspect of what I’m referring to: the locker room. Our locker room is a place where men are men and women are usually too smart to venture (though I feel compelled to add we’ve had a woman or

two join us on occasion, and it can be quite literally a breath of fresh air to have a female presence in the room).

There’s something utterly unique about the hockey locker room. I’m not sure why. I’ve played other team sports and none of the locker rooms were like this one. For now, I will forgo getting into the various psychoanalytic “theories of the womb” having to do with the warm cocoon of the locker room, where everyone’s dripping wet and everything carries a vaguely fecund odour. But there is no doubt the hockey locker room is different than those of other sports. It carries an air of exhaustion baseball doesn’t force on you, an intimacy football loses through sheer roster numbers. The soccer locker room (if you’re lucky enough to have one) may be closest, with similar player numbers and roughly equivalent levels of fatigue. Still, soccer doesn’t feature the great joys of getting to the rink hours in advance to don the equipment in the same ritualized, almost obsessive way that hockey players have, decade after decade. Soccer players also usually wash their socks.

But more than the equipment rituals, I think the locker room retains a mystique and even an unspoken attraction for men because of its simple

intimacy. It provides an easy way to manufacture conditions for intimacy under which men can operate without ever having to pretend or, God forbid, admit that they care about anyone. Friendships are formed, personalities are revealed, bonds are cemented. It’s a safe haven for men in a way that sitting in a Starbucks with a couple of pals sipping a chai latte and sharing a low-fat cranberry muffin probably never will be. As shocking as this may be to the distaff side, men are evolving but have not yet fully grasped the frankly rather bizarre bonding methods women typically favour (such as the premeditated use of not just questions, but answers). The locker room, therefore, offers a frictionless way for men to bond while also participating in the one thing that truly defines us as men: abusing one another verbally. Women, of course, can also dish it out when they have to, and I have no doubt women’s locker rooms feature their own brand of bonding and ritual. My daughters love hockey and they can cut someone (okay, me) down to size with a couple of words and a half-lidded glance. But my sense - or hope - is that women are above it all. Men, on the other hand, are plainly at their most manlike (notice I didn’t say manly) when they are able to freely harass, torment, provoke and insult one another.

Take one of the friends I play with every Wednesday. We’ll call him JR. He’s one of the best players on the ice and is well liked by all, but it isn’t until you hit the locker room that his true gifts are revealed. It’s in our little hockey hall that he shines, doling out the abuse he feels is warranted on a weekly basis. If someone whacks him on the shins, he will suffer in the locker room. If someone cherry picks, he’ll hear about it. If someone quits early because it’s too cold, the poor sap will absorb a few slurs at the earliest possible moment. Even in writing this, I am exposing myself to the worst JR has to offer. For what, you may ask. For writing about hockey instead of getting out there and playing the bleeping game, even though I play it like a bleeping bleepy.

Yet it’s moments such as these that bring dreamy smiles to the faces of hockey veterans. Locker-room ribbing is part of how men communicate the world over - a male Esperanto if you will - and though I make no claims about its psychological worth, I think it’s a big part of why hockey veterans and former pros miss the game so much. Sure, they wish they were still flying up and down the rink, but it’s all the other stuff they miss nearly as much.

Bobby Orr once said hanging out with the guys was something he missed after hanging up the blades, and one of the reasons Wayne Gretzky came> back to coach the hapless Phoenix Coyotes was that he missed the locker room. Even Pat Quinn, the 65-year-old coach fresh off the thrilling World Junior success, was quoted as saying he came back to the game because he “liked being around the rink and liked being around the players.”

You could parse that many different ways, but to me it’s simple: He liked being in the locker room. I don’t blame him.

By Curtis Gillespie

Curtis Gillespie’s most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.

TJ’s comment that “taxpayers contain within themselves the seeds for their own funny farm” got me to thinking. That in itself (me thinking) is a bit of a foreign travaille. The more I thought about it and the more I started researching, the more pissed off I became.  In a day when nothing stays hidden away in the confines of a filing cabinet but rather naked facts are now perched on the top of everyone desk, gyrating around a stainless-steel pole, while the viewing public is ogling at them.

You don’t have to look far into the public domain to find out some things, simply,, piss you right off. I almost wish that I never knew what hid behind that public service g-string but curiosity invoke some of the strangest characteristics in people, myself included. I am curious by nature. That why I electrocuted myself when I was six, threw up after smoking a cigarette when I was eight, and still to this day, struggle not to stick the 9 volt battery to my tongue.

 I recently discovered the Ontario Government Public Disclosure website that, essentially, lists every employee paid by the Ontario taxpayer that earns over $100,000 annually. After a couple hours of data compilation where I mud wrestled these bundles of systemic abusers from the people that actually deserve the dough, a dirty feeling came over me; I felt violated.  The feeling then moved to sickness. Then the consequence and liability lights started to brighten and I became terribly concerned.  Then it was, holy crap !!!!! I gotta get the hell out of Dodge (sic).

This peep show that I had ventured into had a bus driver in the City of Ottawa making $129,000 in only one year.  I said to myself, “ Holy F%$k”, as a saw that a Vice-President of a major University; she with 12 letters after her name, was making less than this particular bus driver.  There then appeared Scads of police constables; not inspectors or the like, but plain ordinary constables earning well into six figures. Behind door number three, I saw a room full of elementary school teachers planning what to do with their summers off, all the while earning more than a $100K annually.

Over in the champagne room were the high rollers. It was full of Electricity. Here I looked in and saw a dude in the corner being entertained by two girls named Amber and Cheyenne (those were their real names). I checked the data…..wow….the head of a major Ontario Utility. He was pulling down a tidy $1,500,000 annually. He quietly took a twenty out of my left pocket and gave it to Amber. This dude didn’t keep it all to himself. I discovered a culture of greed right throughout his organization; over 6500 employees under him had also passed the 100K plateau and God only know how many are about to pass thru that threshold in the near future.    

In all, over 36,000 Ontarians were members of this exclusive club. Club membership dues tallied a staggering $4,500,000,000.  Yes kids, those are billions!!!! Then it hit me. A bunch of questions started percolating.  What is the benefit package costing us? What is the future pension liability? What are the other future liabilities of these benefit package? At first glance, I’m assuming that they’ll being pulling in 70% pensions when they’re done being employed.  As this generation retires and new hogs belly up to the trough, we have some substantial compounding taking place.  Are we in a position to fund this? I mean to say, “Are our kids in a position to fund this?” Along with the $100K club, they are also going to have to deal with the farm team. The folk in Ontarioland that didn’t quite make it to the doors of the $100K club but still have an all day pass on the “70% Gravy Train Express”. I assume that is the fat end of the pyramid but that scares the shite out me if the pointy end has 36,000 members. How big is this liability.

The delta, at this rate, is inevitable; All our tax dollars will eventually go to salaries….nothing else.

All this perversion to take you to where we are now.  Here in the City of Ottawa…..Here in the City of Orleans.   We already see a machine here,  where too much tax revenue goes to the labour pool. Nothing is ever left for programs. Nothing for buildings. Nothing for roads. Nothing for nothing. This economic model is headed for only one conclusion…collapse….and everybody knows it when they go to sleep at night. The OC Transpo strike is just one manifestation of an ulcer bleeding and revealing  the true capacity of this City’s leadership.

I stepped out on my front step at midnight last night. I thought I smelled Thuso blowing in. Not an uncommon aroma here in Orleans. I looked a little closer. The wind was blowing to the East.

Whoever wrote that taxpayers contain within themselves the seeds for their own funny farm sure saw the OC Transpo boys coming. Let me get this straight Ottawans: your bus drivers now have a higher salary than a mid-career JAZZ airline pilot, and are hot and bothered and ready to turn down a pay increase over some choice thing where they get to choose the colour of their band-aid on boo-boo Thursdays.

Somebody should be writing some laws to throw these collective no-bargaining bums on the street.

TJ Snodgrass, from far away

I have followed for some weeks the growing Ottawa discussion over impending property tax increases as the post-freeze scenario resets to current market values. At the heart of the story is the fact that urban, core properties will reset higher while the suburban rates lower or at least remain relatively static. In this tale of two cities, cries of ‘unfair’ may be heard on both sides: those on Frank Street overlooking the canal claim their long-standing dreams of an urban haven are at risk as market muscles flex; those on Rue Topello in Orleans can firmly and pragmatically suggest that if you want to dance, you should probably pay the fiddler.
There is no fair. There is, however, some reality to discuss. Unless someone puts a working model on the table where an alternative to property appraisals is applied, and I haven’t seen one short of a Stalinist scheme, the insatiable city bills will be paid. The tax cards will fall where they may, and some of those extrapolated ‘mays’ happen to include the verifiable notion that specific property values vary for specific reasons.
I have lived on Frank Street. It was the seventies and I was a Carleton student, mostly cashless and carefree, more likely ravenous than Raven on any given day. It was the time when somebody figured that if you cleaned the snow off the canal you could skate on it. It was the time when a quick walk across the bridge to St Patrick’s College would get you a free hop to the Carleton campus on one of the seemingly immortal blue and white Mercedes shuttles. It was the time that a bakery would flood the neighbourhood with those wonderful sweet, doughy smells every morning; the nut and fun-loving black squirrels could be mistaken for fat cats. A short walk over to and up Elgin was always fun, and the return down a tulip-laden Rideau was comforting in the civilized sense. My monthly budget was $400 and that was stretched to include tax, title, tuition, rent, books, brew and sometimes food. And it worked. Not quite halcyon days, but closer to the best of times than the worst.
Is that today’s reality? Tuition costs alone across the country hover around 5K. Canal skating is now closer to an institution than a lark. The bakery is gone as is the free bus. My former nest on Frank housing my single room for double-digit rent, is probably more desirable than ever in the quaint sense, and probably unreachable without going to six digits.
Do times change? Sure they do. Except for the squirrels, of course, those kitties on the Rideau. Last time I indulged the canal with a stroll, seems like their numbers may have edged up.

My last over the fence conversation ended with a nasty declaration of “punks” and it was spoken with no lack of emphasis. My neighbour was referring to the authors of some graffiti she’d seen on the drive home. “Why would they do that?” In her mind it was an unerasable scar, an affront, the first step on a slippery slope to de-civilization. She was miffed.

My own thoughts are a little more tempered and mostly recollected. Coming out of Montreal on the southbound Amtrak in the seventies: the trackside graffiti alone were entertainment for hours. Or how about that afternoon at the old GCTC on Sunnyside, sprucing up the walls, covering a declaration in bright red and yellow spray paint that “Jeremy Rules…Long Live Jeremy.” These recollections seemed to point more to pained authorship than criminal mischief, and that mystery and profundity may be locked in every aerosol can. There is an urge all right and it is likely youthful; it is texting in very large and public fonts.

“Urge?” Instinct might be closer to the centre of the target. Every time I look at the cacophonous and over-subscribed boards of an NHL rink I am reminded how strong the will is. It is the corporate need to be recognized and claim the space. And we allow it, practically demand it. It is not advertising. I don’t watch the game and have a sudden desire to leave and make a quick bank deposit or buy a doughnut. It is graffiti, paid for by the square inch and consumed by the square mile.

There has to be a sequence on the genome that demands such displays. They have been around forever. Stonehenge a mystery? Not really. What were those large stones displaying when the priests and locals met for a little ritualistic foreplay and pagan worship? The paints and pigments have long worn off but I can see the message as clearly as an electronic billboard: “ochluk…the best in elk horn knives.” The next year it would have been simply “ochluk.” Then the exclamatory “och,” which has survived. There it is.

So I say give them a space. Give them some raw concrete or the side of a building. Do the Orleans Berlin wall. Give them the yourspace fence. Let it out. Remember, Jeremy rules.

T.J. Snodgrass