by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

You know these stories of people screwing up and yet still bouncing back to become monster successes?

I find them quite good and rather instructive.

Here's one of my favourite such tales. Denis Lazure started out as a psychiatrist at the St-Jean-de-Dieu insane asylum in the early 1950s, at a time when even he admits perfectly sane people were sent inside and electrocuted almost indiscriminately.

He recounts in his autobiography that he'd "start the day by pushing the button on the electrical box that sends a current to provoke an epilectic-style convulsion to dozens of patients who hadn't received any preparatory medication!"

Lazure would then saunter off to the "insulin coma rooms... half-lit, foul smelling, with two dozen patients who we'd shoot up with powerful doses of insulin to go into a coma. After a few hours of excessive sedation, they'd get a glucose injection, which usually brought them back to consciousness. It sometimes happened that we got the shock of a patient who fails to reawaken and to have to announce it to the family."

In spite of this questionable business, Lazure went on to head hospitals and run the provincial health ministry, fried brains and accidental overdoses not slowing him down one bit.

Another tale I enjoy is that of former PQ MNA Gilles Baril, whose self-penned life story explains how he inhaled his first taste of cocaine the night he was elected as a 24-year-old PQ MNA in 1981. He liked it so much that when he was voted out four years later, he relocated to South America to consume high-quality crack. When he returned he hosted a radio show, which he prepared for by staying up all night with cocaine and hookers.

Baril's buddies Pierre Péladeau and Bernard Landry helped set him back on course. The rehab was so complete that Landry groomed him as his successor as premier of Quebec. But Baril was caught chumming up too much with a lobbyist, and was jettisoned to the Hydro-Québec office in Chile, heading the all-important, perhaps crucial, Santiago office.

I know what you're saying: "But Kristian, they're members of the elite with friends in high places. They're unlike working stiffs."

Ah, but here's the point: the age where such career rehabilitation remains the exclusive domain of the elite might be at a glorious end.

Here's why: thanks partially to boomers retiring, Quebec's unemployment rate is at 8.5 per cent, a disorienting number for those used to the unemployment office crowded like la fête nationale sur Mont Royal.

Low unemployment means that workers can quit a job one day, start another the next; no more need to fudge on résumés or list off your "weaknesses" in job interviews.

An easy-to-return-to job market will also promote creativity. You could renounce your soul-destroying squarejohn office existence and make your own special contribution (for example, I'd really like somebody to open up a theme park where people drive small cars up mountain paths avoiding flaming balls of hay rolling downwards).

So with any luck it's not just a new year that has begun, but a new, demographically driven golden era of opportunity for wage-slaves in the city.

•••

For five years the video store at Décarie and Sherbrooke has been my neighbourhood cultural mecca. The staffers are clever and opinionated and generally well-scrubbed. But a cheaper competitor, called Videoself, has opened directly across the street. It's an Italian-built machine that allows you to rent movies for a buck for six hours without human interaction. It's one of 14 on the island. Soon there will be 19, and they hope to have 100 eventually. Pony up 50-grand and you can have your own franchise. So do I forsake my likeable video store for the cheaper place? I can't decide. I'll have wifey take over the movie-renting duties. Although that undoubtedly means I'll have to sit through films like Shaft in Africa and those crap Chinese movies where people fly around on wires.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca