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Leonard Fysh Drugs - Moose Jaw
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Memory
- Hits: 34
Briefly reliving my childhood - Leonard Fysh Drugs in Moose Jaw.
Somewhere off Main St, downtown, close to the railway station.
I'm probably 12, and I'd gotten hold of one of those old "Science Experiments you can do at home" for kids books, and had been all over town looking for supplies...most of the drugstores had nothing I needed.
The "Make Beautiful Crystals from Borax/Laundry Soap" experiment had been tried, it didn't work out. But there were a lot more...
The front of the drugstore, filled with the standard druggist props, medical aids, mortar/pestles, but the back resembled some old-time apothecary, jars upon jars filled with ...?
I had my list. Start with Ammonium Dichromate, an orange powder that when lit would turn into a fiery volcano spewing toxic carcinogenic green ash all over the neighborhood. They had it, and they sold it to me, and I was in business.
This experiment worked well, exactly as predicted.
And I went back a number of times, money from my paper route to buy things that very few adults, let alone children, could buy now. Magnesium, in long wires, sold by the foot, and this, while tough to light, burned with an incandescant white glow...
Or the glycerin and Potassium Permanganate reaction, buy a bottle of glycerin, add a few sprinkles of the Potassium Permanganate, and soon the mixture would begin to smoke - violent, vile smelling, huge white clouds, and then burst into flames. If you capped the bottle it would explode, which - provided you were out of range, proved even more exciting.
My father discovered the bottle of glycerin and forbid me from any more chemistry experiments, he confused glycerin with nitro-glycerin, and I tried to explain but what parent listens to their 12 year old son?
This "experiment" came in handy in High School, in Edmonton, when a group of us would wander from Louis St. Laurent High School to the adjacent Harry Ainley High School, set up our time-delayed bombs in their bathroom, then return to enjoy the evacuation of the school from the windows of our classroom...
And again in Surrey, where I showed some friends it in the bathroom, and having long since deserted when the fire alarm went off we enjoyed an early recess in the yard, although my teacher was a little suspicious when after a few "trial runs" I started packing up my bag before the alarm, a little too much foreknowledge.
OF Wasp nests and Jellyfish on Kootenay Lake
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 35
I'm walking on the shore of Kootenay Lake with JR (the infamous son of the last restaurant I worked in...). It's a beautiful day, the sun is bright and trees hang their branches over the sandy shore. JR, he's finding these little grey paper wasp nest submerged in the lake, just beneath the surface, and he's telling me that sometimes wasps survive the freezing of the lake (?), and he's taking them out and gently hanging them from trees, and I'm wondering why?
I'm walking in the water, noticing strings of algae, when one begins to move, pulsate, and I recognize that it's some form of jellyfish, and there's another one, clearer, transparent, with tentacles like an octopus...
(Dreams lately restless and largely inexplicable)
Ethan Crumbley's Fine Parents
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 46
For those of you not paying attention, Ethan Crumbley was the Oxford, Michigan student who killed 4 students and wounded another 7 in a schoolyard shooting. Prosecutors later sought to hold the parents responsible.
Link here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/oxford-school-shooting-ethan-crumbley-parents.html
And here: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/us/crumbley-parents-michigan-shooting-prosecutors-sentence/index.html
Note the phrases "Chilling Lack of Remorse" and "Threatened Prosecutors".
Ethan Crumbley was the victim of incredibly negligent and indifferent parents. His mother too busy swinging with strangers to heed his pleas for mental help, his parents instead "placating" him by buying him a gun.
***
This is long overdue. While there are "Bad Seeds", Children who despite the best of parenting grow up to be murderers and monsters, this is the exception, not the rule. And just as those dog-owners who allow their animals to maul, maim and kill innocent children and elderly people, they should be held culpable. Ethan Crumbley was more a victim and his parents were the villains.
***
This case reminds me of the 2019 manhunt for Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, the two young men who murdered 3 people across Northern BC, disappeared, and were found dead after an intense manhunt across 4 provinces.
You can read the details here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/northern-bc-murders-ito-1.5401732
And watch the interview with Kam McLeod's father here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HGJWr_Ycis
It doesn't take long to realize how this situation developed. Again, the fact that the young men were guilty of atrocities does not diminish the fact they were also victims of appalling parenting that should in some ways be held accountable.
But accountability is an idea so far beyond the pale of our judicial system it doesn't bear mention.
The Immaculate Neighbor
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 42
In a weak moment, outside, I spot the neighbor on the landing above and ask to buy a cigarette. She lives in the apartment directly above me. Petite blonde woman who by some miracle or coincidence is exactly my age. I was introduced by the building manager.
So she's chatty and this is the price you have to pay when you want a cigarette. Personally, I'd like to just buy a cigarette and leave it at that but I don't want to seem unneighborly.
Chat chat chat and glancing through her open door I pause to admire her apartment. Exactly the same layout as mine, only...
Well, god-damn if she hasn't done a bang-up job of furnishing the place. And the place is packed with stuff - book-cases, night-tables, chairs, shelves, pictures on every ledge, of family, "art" of the sort that I'm not a fan of, but her taste is pretty much the same as every other woman of her/my age, and - she's run with it, done great things, the place, cozy, clean, filled to the brim with both possessions and room to move.
She's not trying to come on to me. She wants to see my place, which is out of the question, the "studio" is in complete disarray, paints, pastels, acrylic, oil, watercolor, stacks of tarot cards and books teetering on the desk, the 20 or so candlesticks handy to my situation everywhere, more sand on the floor than on the beach, it's out of the question....
What's going on down there? She's asking, are you getting laid?, you sure make a lot of noise. This can be put down to my drunken staggering about in the wee hours knocking over every precipitously stacked picture frame, book, extraneous pieces of shit I set in the way of progress and getting lucky, a diabolical obstacle course of mine own devising, a pile of shoes at the door, laundry in the bedroom, but these aren't particularly better things to confess to so I simply sidestep the question.
She's insistent. She's not trying to get lucky, no, but it's been sooo long and damn, who's that woman I keep seeing you outside with? And I have to think, and it clicks, another volunteer from the charity shop, and laugh, nope, nope, nope.
I'm living in the land of nope.
Finally I manage to escape, go downstairs, smoke my cigarette, save the spare.
***
The night, rainy, pouring, thunder and lightning. Wake up at 3:30, restless, unable to sleep. I still have the spare cigarette.
***
Lie in bed, trying to fall back asleep. It's her turn now to make noise, the wheels of luggage on the floor above, furniture being shuffled, I'm lying there quiet as a mouse, doesn't she sleep?
There's a knocking, a scritching at the door. Damn. Apparently not.
Answer the door and she's apologetic, she's restless, can't sleep, she wants to look around my place, walks in and seats herself while I get dressed. A horrified look around convinces her of the veracity of my statement, my housekeeping is abysmal. We go for a cigarette. It's now about 4:30. Back inside, now to her place, the reasonable choice, on her sofa. She's straddling my lap fixing my collar, no, she's not trying to get lucky. She's splayed out with her painted toenails hanging over my lap. She's not trying to get lucky but damn I'm tall and handsome. A real fixer-upper. She's lifting her shirt, showing me imaginary bruises.
Now she's on her phone, wants to show me some pictures, artists she likes, "Oooops, I really should delete those..."
I avert my eyes.
And she tells me, it's a secret, I can tell nobody, her sister, the building manager....
***
We're going to be best of friends and I'm committed to taking her out sometime, someplace, a proper date, committed to helping her get lucky, I can be her wingman, what do I think of her chances?
***
And finally, finally, she heads upstairs. On her own. And this, a new best friend who doesn't want to get lucky but is going to be scratching on my door every night in the wee hours, and what can I do? I'm suddenly open to the idea of a night shift, if only this town had a Denny's or 24 hour waffle house, and I'm thinking, fucking hell, how many times have I been in this position since moving out here, and maybe I need to start wearing a clerical collar, shave my head, don the monastic robes, remove myself from every woman's list of possibilities...
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