Uranium Kiss

            The main thing I needed to do on Sunday, November 6, besides the regular stuff, like breathing, was the laundry. Since I only had a toonie, which wasn’t enough to do my laundry, which gave me a chance to do something that has been on the back burner for a long time. So I took my beer cans to the Beer Store, which gave me an opportunity to do something that I’ve been curious about for a while. I asked the clerk if the rumour was true that the Beer Store is moving down to the location of The Dollarama, on Queen Street. As she was handing me my $2.30, she told me that in one or two years Beer Store will be closing down for a while because a condo is going to be built there, but after that they will reopen in the same location.
            As I was locking my bike on the sidewalk across the parking lot from the Laundromat, on the other side of the street, the guy that often walks around the neighbourhood, was sitting on the sidewalk and rocking back and forth while chanting, ting and swearing, “Shut up or get shut up, shut up or get shut up, shut up or get shut up …” Standing on the sidewalk near me was an older gentleman in a fancy white pork-pie hat. He was laughing as if the mentally ill man was hilarious.
            I had such a hassle manipulating my new padlock with the plastic cover on it that when I got home I took it off. I think it’ll be a good thing to carry around in my backpack on wet or snowy days, but it’s so much easier to lock or unlock the lock without the plastic slipping around and getting in my way.
            That night I watched an episode of The Lucy-Desi Hour” in which Lucy, Desi, Fred, Ethel and Fred MacMurray, all decide to go uranium hunting with Geiger counters outside of Las Vegas. It wasn’t a very funny episode, and in fact it showed a mean spiritedness that was atypical of the relationships these characters have had over the years. What was interesting though was the way people in the 1950s treated uranium like it wasn’t toxic. Fred kissed the sample that had come with Lucy’s Geiger counter when he heard how much money uranium is worth.