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Garbage at the Thrift Shop
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 38
4 days last week, keeping up with the flow of garbage so we don't get backlogged. And doing pretty good until Friday, when I went in and discovered some 30 large UHAUL boxes, an older lady slipped on the ice at Wal-Mart, brought to Kelowna to be with her family. So her estate was packed up, all of it, no room in the home for it all. And what a lot of shit she had.
Baking pans, maybe 50 counting muffin tins, all in good shape, some used once if at all. Every conceivable kitchen appliance. A hundred electric labour saving carrot slicers, radish dicers, cucumber spiralizers, blenders, mixing bowls, coffee mugs, brand new in the case, quality shit, for sure it'll sell, only, only we already have a hundred more just like them on the shelves.
And so it goes, and I'm wondering, how does one person have so much kitchen shit? I mean, how many baking pans do you need? And gadgets, do-dads, what-nots, many never even used, straight from the Wal-Mart to us...
I'm talking it over with a friend, baffled by this consumerism without end, and she explains it well. That as the Matriarch with everything she's probably stumped her kids, grand-kids, great-grand-kids for gifts, what to get the person with everything, and so the things she once liked are repeated endlessly without end, the inanity of custom demanding acknowledgement of every anniversary, birthday, Xmas, and so it piles up and up..
And yesterday, watching the cars pull up and unload their shit, more shit, more shit, boxes and boxes of stuff that will buy a little time on our shelves before heading for the landfill...
Mr. Tickles in Ymir
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 34
And I hear from Mr. Tickles, who's been wintering in Ymir and whom I haven't heard of nor seen in the long wintry 6 months since we parted in October.
He's doing well, as well as can be expected, on his way back from Balfour to Ymir, his car, parked at the Superette all winter now driven across the highway to be fixed since last years accident, and we catch up.
He'd dropped by the restaurant to say hi, they offered him his job back, he could live in the basement, Sean's old apartment, no thanks. He hasn't got work. Ymir - well, he's refrained from meeting the locals, hasn't gotten work, although he got a few months more EI than I had available, largely due to the fact that he'd worked a couple of months at the local dive bar before being fired for being too white.
It happens. East Indians would prefer to work with East Indians, and our government only recognizes discrimination by white people, not against them.
Ymir, not even 250 people, 30 KM SE of Nelson, not much going on in Ymir. So a long winter for him. He's never left all winter. We reminisce about old times, about all the grief I used to give him and all his little trainees, the young 14, 15, 16 year old girls and boys who's first job happened to be that cesspool of a ...
He misses working with me and knowing that wherever he finds work next it's not going to be anywhere near as amusing...
We talk, about how the old restaurant, the new chef got cancer and quit within 2 weeks. A coincidence? I don't think so.
And about old servers and kitchen staff we knew, news, where available, and asking of a few of the more infamous locals, he has news on one, the crackhead who contacted me to borrow money last fall, set up a go-fund-me to get to Calgary, she's got an Only Fans, and I'm like...?? Her and a few others I know, apparently.
And he's met the new waiter, thought I'd be back there, looked for my puppets behind the bar, no puppets, no Rod, and he was perhaps as surprised I wasn't back as I am that he isn't going back.
We're both overdue for employ, but not at that price.
And we chat the other restaurant, the dive bar, run by a MAGA couple, "managed" you might say only there's nothing approaching management, just the village idiot and his wife calling the shots, him, from a pint of beer at the end of the bar (which entitles him to an equal share in the tips, because somehow he feels he's doing "equal work"), and his wife, who just installed a new camera/microphone/speaker system behind the bar, so she can "manage remotely" and I've heard from staff that her voice will appear out of nowhere, she's on her phone at the Wal-Mart or Dairy Queen checking the cameras, and you know that not only that this is creepy as fuck it's also a big sign that neither of them knows what the fuck they are doing.
Camera's, technology, surveillance, all this technology enables people, restaurants, that are bad at their job to be even worse at their jobs. Who ever heard of "remotely managing" a restaurant? Oh, and she's as well doing "equal work" and claiming her share of the tips, despite weeks going by without a single employee seeing her face. We're both Alumni of Unspeakable Trauma, and despite coming from one of the poorest run joints on the planet there's always competition by those who manage to do it worse.
So, this catches me up with Mr. Tickles, Cathy now is back from California and I'm due to catch up with her, soon, and I'll write about that when it happens...
Kelly Shpeley
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Other
- Hits: 37
A local artist of some considerable talent, showing now at the Cantina on Baker.
View more of her work here: https://kellyshpeley.com/previous-work
She'd be an interesting person to meet, were it not for the fact I'd probably enquire about rhyming her first and last name and that would not endear me...
Leonard Fysh Drugs - Moose Jaw
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Memory
- Hits: 37
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.
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