by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

When I was young, my father gave me a beautiful, handcrafted chess set. I was fascinated by the game. I learned quickly and started beating some opponents. I soon learned of a chess tournament down the street.

Guess who won that tournament.

Later on, I took to baseball, practicing my fielding by bouncing a ball against the wall for hours on end. Soon I was a svelte leopard leaping on balls and firing them back instantly to the imagined target. Eventually the local baseball league started up and a certain child won a prize for best fielder.

Guess who won that award.

Then in high school, one of my classes involved writing essays about humanitarian and ethical issues. My teacher cultivated me and provided me enthusiastic feedback concerning my output. At the end of the year, the school gave a prize to the student who best excelled at those essays.

Do you know who won those honours?

I haven’t the slightest clue. It wasn’t me. I tended to lose interest before any real life competition began. I was just a little too lazy to actually try hard enough to win anything.

I feel good about my lack of victories because somewhere, there’s a kid who won partially because I didn’t stand in his way. To win, somebody’s got to lose. And as Montrealers, we understand that. We’re a gentle, lazy, sensitive, uncompetitive and unambitious lot that generally would rather not deal with conflict.

And nowadays, Montreal is as close to a non-competitive urban utopia as can be, with no pro hockey or baseball to manipulate and inflame competitive urges.

But none of this is bad. We’re not lazy in a bad way. We intrinsically understand and appreciate leisure on its most profound level. Our laziness can be a model for other rat-race-weary urban centres.

Here’s some lazily-researched anecdotal evidence to illustrate our indifference to what might elsewhere seem monumental transgressions of sloth. A friend working in the provincial bureaucracy noticed that a colleague would show up on time and whip out a newspaper. He’d read it for a couple of hours. Then he’d do some work staring out the window. He did this every day for his entire shift. This idol of idleness did no work at work.

That’s because when Quebec civil servants have nothing to do, they do nothing. Last election Mario Dumont promised to change this policy. Everybody yawned. More recently, Montreal’s city ombudsman noted that Montreal is paying out millions a year to people who show up to put their feet up on the desk. The media barely bothered reporting this fact.

Montrealers are lackadaisical to the core. Statistical proof abounds: we obtain a disproportionately low number of patents, but we watch loads of TV.

Rather than feel guilty about our sloth, let’s salute ourselves for capturing the zen of passivity and harmony. It’s the lazy way to look at it.

* * *

Lest we forget: in the frantic mania to discuss Karla Homolka, we forget that we have quite a history of equally bloodthirsty sex criminals. For instance, Wayne Boden, known as the Vampire Rapist. Boden murdered Shirley Audette, Marielle Archambault and Jean Way, biting and killing them during sexual encounters between 1968 and 1970. In 1971, he killed Elizabeth Pourteous in Calgary. Boden was caught and given four life sentences. I’ve never seen a photo of him.

Here’s a little about one of the victims. Jean Way, 24, was from Hare Bay, Newfoundland, 300 kilometres from St. John’s. She was slated to return home in a few weeks when found dead by her boyfriend at 1850 Lincoln #203 in January, 1970. Jean was “very friendly, very trusting,” her uncle Robert Way e-mails me. Her parents “never got over that murder of their daughter Jean. Before her father died, he poured a concrete step at the entrance to his house and in the concrete he had small footprints embedded in it so that it would seem as if a young girl (Jean) had just walked into the house.”

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca