by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I don’t know if you gentle readers can handle the truth in large doses. So here are some brief-y notions stuck on the roof of my mind by virtue of their gluey truthfulness. They mostly dawned on me while scrubbing my ears in the shower. Some leapt from the mess of papers on my desk.

A ridiculously persistent rumour has Wal-Mart buying and demolishing the Super C on St-Jacques West. Peter Sergakis will rebuild the Amazones and Picasso strip-and-eats joint across the street. Then a massive Wal-Mart will spring up, complete with grocery store inside. The tale is denied by all involved.

Add Louise O’Sullivan—the downtown city councillor who recently quit Mayor Tremblay’s party—to the list of politicians who lost their careers after speaking out in favour of street prostitution. Other past council vets voted out after expressing tolerance to the ho factor include Sam Boskey, Sammy Forcillo (who’s planning a political comeback this fall) and Filippo Salvatore. Right or wrong, voters want their councillors to be hardline proponents of NIMBY politics.

Since last year it’s easier to get a syringe than a swizzle stick in dry Verdun. The authorities snuck a needle exchange into the area without too much outcry. Needle exchanges are meant to reduce the spread of disease among IV drug users, but a St-Luc Hospital trial in January 1998 embarrassingly demonstrated that HIV rates actually doubled among locals using needle exchange. Unlike cities like Vancouver, where heroin is the soupe-du-jour, Montreal injectors prefer cocaine, a drug that requires transforming yourself into a human pincushion. So users would make new junkie friends through the needle exchanges, then share needles anyway. The solution has been to give junkies a totally unlimited number of needles (the 1998 report’s authors and the American Journal of Epidemiology suggested expanding the needle exchange program).

Long ago I lived at 4221 St-Urbain, a building owned by a hardworking, gentle Portuguese. Since then Peter Vasilopanagos bought the building and informed the tenants of dozens of new lease clauses, including one that saw rents raised hundreds of dollars a month to reflect the average in the area. The rent raise attempt was shot down at the rental board, but most tenants scurried out soon after. Now rents are way up at St-Urbain and Rachel.

Charlie Biddle’s widow is losing her Griffintown apartment of 25 years. The longtime home of the legendary jazzman and fabulous four kids is going the way of landlord repossession...

I blame Jughead, that comic book glutton who never gets fat, for contributing to America’s obesity. While I’m at it, Charlie Brown is partly responsible for adult male depression.

Before Westmount officially demerges, I’d love to see Montreal force a huge social housing complex on the area. Last summer Westmount ratfinks exiled their own local rugby team, claiming not enough of its players live in Westmount. I will protest, when I get a chance, by tossing stinky old rugby shoes over their phone lines and leaving them hanging up there ghetto style... and you might’ve noticed that Westmount is now zoned only to get the money-making housing component of the superhospital project while NDG shoulders the industrial side of the affair. Who negotiated this, Irving Grundman?

You’re crazy if you’re out walking a pit bull and imagining that police won’t secretly consider the possibility that you’re involved in a drug ring... Albert Broccoli’s ancestors invented broccoli by combining cauliflower with peas. I am trying to cross a banana and onion to create the banonion.

I’m lobbying the city to turn part of the walled-off city parking lot/former dump at Madison and St-Jacques into a park, dog run or basketball court. Phone la ville if you’re onside. Also, I continue to urge Canada’s weather mafia to calculate a “sun warmth factor” alongside the gloomy sounding “wind chill factor,” but so far, no commitment.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca