Rose's Cantina

Embed from Getty Images I love going to the Ottawa Hospital. It's like going to Cheers! where everybody knows your name. If you get lost, a nice volunteer or even a doctor, will actually walk you to your destination. If you lose your parking ticket, you merely have to summon a nice young man who will help you out. It's not the same at the Ottawa Civic, where I went with Jennette today, not the same at all. First of all, you can't find parking. Second, they tell you to follow the blue dots and they're actually purple. And nobody helps you. Not even the volunteers who seem to scatter when someone shoots them a quizzical look. I've actually been flummoxed going there and often thought of calling an ambulance and paying the $45 fee, or hitching a ride on the orange helicopter. I'd probably be sent to jail for mischief, but hey! it isn't against the law to fantasize. Sometimes you just have to go to the Civic, and there's no getting out of...

As I sit on my perch surveying my kingdom, I watch the weirdos and drug addicts walk down the street and I try not to be judgmental. Who am I? I know nothing about their lives. Maybe they used to be rock stars or soccer kids. Somebody must have loved them. Maybe they had jobs and dreams.  Not today, not on this journey down the road to despair. I live on Saint Laurent Boulevard, a trashy street in the east end of Ottawa, a block from a Quickie convenience store, and directly across from a grow-op. It might not be a grow-op but it certainly is a quick stop for drugs. Stretch limos arrive at all hours and there's a lot of foot traffic, in and out, sure signs of nasty business being transacted within. The place is a dilapitated war-era house, the kind that might have started out as a trailer but somehow morphed into a single home dwelling in what was once an Ottawa suburb. It's certainly seen better days with its unkempt lawn, wooden deck that is oddly out...