Okay, now I knowwe're living in a simulation. At 9:30 this morning I made the mistake of leaning over while moving at an angle, and a heretofore unknown muscle or tendon or some other piece of querulous meat said HELLLLO and twanged in a way that lets you know it’ll twinge for a week. I took a 12-hour relief pill and got on with my day. At 9:30 PM the muscle pinged: so as I was saying before I was so cruelly interrupted. Twelve hours on the dot. This only works if the computer simulation set a timer and forgot to enable “fuzzy” parameters, so it went off exactly.
It wasn’t bad. I didn’t go into Unger Mode.
The best thing to do is go to the gym and lift some weights incorrectly so you have another pain that gets solved by the 12-hour pill. I mean, as long as it's in you, coursing around, numbing and nullifying, might as well get your money's worth.
What if I quit? I thought, walking to my car at day's end. No, we have to get the Substack fully engaged, build up a cushion to insulate me from more brilliant decisions from on high.
But no seriously what if I just . . . quit
This would mean I would finally have to do the pencil dispersement ceremony, something I dreamed up a very long time ago. As I mentioned, I have a cup on my desk filled with nice wooden pencils. Not painted; natural wood in various hues. I bought them my first day at work, along with the cup. I had a month to settle in before I was expected to write anything, which was typical of the business at the time: indulgent. Fat. I’d gone to Crate & Barrel and bought things for my desk. Never sharpened the pencils. Eventually I decided I never would. On my last day I would hand them out to others and then break the last one.
But who, now, would I give them to? The turnover has been significant; the old guard is mostly gone, taking with them the institutional memory of the paper. I wouldn’t be surprised if 60% of the people in the shop weren’t around in the old building. The number of people who were there for the days of thick Sunday papers and bureaus in other cities and bustling activity on every floor, humming newsroom burbling with the sound of phones - we drop off one by one now.
What, exactly, would I miss?
Routine, a place to go. Well, these can be reconstructed. I would surely miss the chats with the fellow in the next cubicle, with whom I chat movies and history and TV and such. That, alas, would be irreplaceable. (He was in the next cubicle over a year after I started at the paper. We are survivors.) I would miss the gym but there are others. I’m coming up on two years clanking and huffing at that place, anyway.
The first step to leaving is entertaining the idea; the second is getting comfortable with it. The third is looking at the calendar. The fourth is writing your Farewell-thanks-and-also-FU to go in the Slack channel, I guess.
The fifth, and probably the most delusional, is the belief that you will now use the free time to write a novel.
Today was the first day I looked at the calendar.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
I typed “1982” into newspapers.com, and was shown a 1968 page from newspaper that served 100 Mile House. Okay, thanks. There was an ad:
The local druggist. A classic mid-century storefront. (The picture in the "Here" section above was from the ad, showing the interior.) Rexall had reached all the way to British Columbia. To my surprise, the brand still exists up there:
Rexall Canada was founded in 1904 in the early days of the United Drug Company and quickly established itself as a major retail pharmacy chain. At the same time, Tamblyn Drugs was establishing itself in Toronto, Ontario, and would eventually become Pharma Plus. These two companies would later merge and form the Rexall Pharmacy Group.
What’s the origin of the name?
The "Rex" in the name was derived from the name of Ellen M. Regis, who developed "Rexall remedies" and from whom the company purchased the mark.
That’s not as helpful as it could be. Let’s Google . . . ah, a lawsuit in 1904. She sued someone over the Rex trademark.
When the plaintiff, Ellen M. Regis, first compounded her preparation in the form of pills she marked on the boxes in which they were sold the word "Rex", from which her family surname was derived.
She not only adopted and attached it as the distinctive feature indicative of the origin, identity and proprietorship of her cure for dyspepsia, but filed it as a trade mark under St. 1895, c. 462, § 1.
No evidence appears that at any time she has abandoned or ceased to use it, but the contrary is true. She has formed a partnership with her son, and from small sales in its original form and within a circumscribed territory other and more attractive combinations have been made, and the business has slowly increased in value and extended into larger fields.
So someone else was using Rexall, and she sued them. A 1918 case has more:
The essential facts are as follows: about the year 1877, Ellen M. Regis, a resident of Haverhill, Massachusetts, began to compound and distribute in a small way a preparation for medicinal use in cases of dyspepsia and some other ailments, to which she applied as a distinguishing name the word "Rex" -- derived from her surname.
A fellow named Theodore Rectanus was selling something under the Rexall brand as well, ignorat of the Regis product. Took some lawsuits to shake it all out.
Anyway. Here’s something I didn’t know. In the 60s, Rexall decided to start a convenience store chain. They called it . . .
PRONTO
There’s very little left of the chain, since it didn’t last. 7-11 was the category killer, and the company decided to cut its losses and close the stores. But:
After graduating from Stanford with his MBA, Jopen Coulombe took a job with a popular pharmacy company, Rexall. Rexall launched five convenient stores and Coulombe was put in charge of one of them. They were opened to compete with stores like 7-Eleven, but didn’t end up doing that well so Rexall shut them down. Instead of letting the store go, Coulombe decided to buy it from Rexall and rebrand.
His idea?
Trader Joe’s. The rest is whimsical marketing history. Inevitable comment on the linked story about the first TJ:
Not really. They served in WW2.
In 1960, the brothers had a disagreement over whether to stock cigarettes. While Theo wanted to sell them, Karl believed they would attract shoplifters. As a result, they divided their stores into two parts, with Theo retaining all stores north of the Ruhr, while Karl retained all stores south of the Ruhr. The first Aldi (short for Albrecht Discount) was opened in 1962, and the two groups became known as Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd, respectively.
Aldi Nord has Trader Joe’s. Aldi Süd has the American Aldis. Nord, by the way, is based in Essen, and that made me smile, since it’s one of the few German words I know, and only then from “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.” There’s a ship called the Immer Essen, which translates to “Always Eating.”
Essen, the home of Aldi’s and Trader Joe’s, means Eating?
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It’s an odd downtown for 100,000 people. You’d think there would be more. Something big. 
