Ask The Galaxy Brains
Each lunar cycle, a human will be allowed to ask The Galaxy Brains a question. In this session, the human will have a choice of answers to consume from three different Galaxy Brains. Please send all questions, be they advise, desire for human-life coaching, knowledge of future or past, or merely interesting recipes, to, to mm@michaelmurray.ca.
HUMAN QUESTION:
Should we let our young sons play with water guns?
ANSWER #1 FROM GALAXY BRAIN JIM DIORIO:
Well, we all had them as kids and we all turned out fine. We hid behind trees, we played soldiers and spies and assassins, we snuck up behind each other and squirted each others’ faces off, and no one ended up walking into a Walmart with an Uzi or storming the Capitol. No one ended up doing anything crazy. But you know what? No one ended up doing anything. We all just went along with whatever everyone else did. We played outside, we shoplifted, we made out in the basement, we went to school, we got married, we had kids, we got high cholesterol, we got fired three times, and then we got older and our bodies started to look like breakfast sausages left out in the sun by accident… and then we ended up drinking in the storage shed, wondering what happened. Holy Mary Mother of God, what happened? I had dreams, I had plans, The Puke Police could have been a damn good band except no one wanted to practice, they all just wanted to smoke dope, and now look at me, sitting in an airless shed filled with broken crap behind a house that looks like every other goddam house on this street of death, every one of them shit out by some black-hearted builder who you know for damn sure isn’t living in one of these soulless stucco dumps. Look at me. I used to look like Simon Le Bon and now I can barely get out of this cheap ass plastic lawn chair.
So no — no, I don’t think kids should play with water pistols. Look at what could happen.
ANSWER #2 FROM GALAXY BRAIN JANE WILSON:
ANSWER #3 FROM GALAXY BRAIN KATHRYN McLEOD:
Should we let our young sons play with water guns?
Well kids can only play with what adults buy for them so let me rephrase the question: Should we buy water guns for our young sons?
No. They can use their finger and pretend it shoots water like I did when I was a young girl growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, except I pretended my finger shot bullets.
And that worked just fine until one day, while with my mother picking up a prescription at Grant’s, where Edith worked, I espied a much better option than my finger in the window display.
Oh what a glorious sight it was. I had never seen such a thing of fun in Grant’s before, which was otherwise joyless. A trip to Grant’s was also unsettling because Edith, of Edith and Tom– who came for dinner every Sunday and Christmas Eve– was there, except wearing a white coat and ringing up sales and acting like a completely different person from the Edith I knew every Sunday and Christmas Eve.
Oh, wow. I just had a breakthrough. I don’t like work because people aren’t themselves at work, they’re completely different people.
Anyway I begged my mother to buy the gun for me but of course she said no, as mothers in those days did to pretty much everything. No, not pretty much everything – everything. And once a mother in those days said no, and mine was “a widow with four young children”, the bar against which all our wants were set, no wasn’t just a complete sentence, it was a final sentence.
This being our reality, so not even a bit like nowadays, it was necessary to come up with work-a-rounds. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. And once I’d espied that gun, it was a necessity.
So it would come to pass that, when my older brother and his friends, with us younger kids tagging ourselves in sans invite, resumed their round of “Guns” (which was what we called the game we played all day every day until it became “Vampires”) I asked Gram, “Gram, will you buy me a gun? There’s one at Grant’s. Mom said I could have it.”
And when Gram said, no, because Gram didn’t have any money of her own and although she was often left with responsibility for us she didn’t always accept it, I said, “That’s okay. I’ll just use my finger.”
But I didn’t just use my finger. I ran back up the street to Grant’s and took that gun out of the window display. And when Mr. Grant yelled, “Hey! What are you doing? Don’t you dare leave this store with that gun!” I yelled back, “It’s okay! My mom told Edith to put it on her tab!”
And I ran back home with the gun and oh boy did I put all those fingers and sticks to shame. I guess? I don’t actually remember that part. All I remember is taking the gun and then having to go back to Grant’s to return it. Oh and apologize to Mr. Grant, who acted like I’d committed the crime of the century even though he made Edith work right up until closing on Christmas Eve, which was why my mom called him, “Scrooge”, and paid her peanuts, which is why my mom kept telling Edith, “that Scrooge is a cheap sonofabitch who pays you peanuts”.
No. Yes. I don’t know. Do what you want. But if your young son grows up to join the police force so he can fire a water cannon at you when you’re out protesting against substandard eldercare, just know it’s likely because you either said no too often or not often enough.
The Galaxy Brains
One terrible night in 1984 she asked a non-pregnant woman when her baby was due. The horror of that moment lives with her still and she has never forgotten it. She thinks some worries are useful lessons, but most are just crap.
The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.