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Handing out Resumes
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Calgary
- Hits: 738
A bad time, this, the week before Christmas, to be looking for work. The standard hours, 2-4, the slow hours, all the restaurants are full. I don't remember this - not recently, the city died a couple of years ago, and we had no rush at Xmas whatsoever. But it didn't die, not completely, just the big Oil Money, and life in the city picked up in a hundred other locations. New restaurants, every one, I've never set foot in most of them, good to see they're busy; a few, you know your resume is heading into the dustbin, I should have edited, aimed for bartender, there's a clear trend to the young and pretty servers, hide the ugly men behind the bar. I'd be fine with it, but a few of them, knock-kneed and unsure, well, they clearly don't know what they're doing, and appearances aside I've always been a fan of competence. Walking, walking, past the bombed out husks of Chianti's, Fiore's on 17th, Morgans, overdue, every restaurant has their day and these had theirs, on 8th Avenue the shell and signage of Divino's, I never worked there but the pretension - even on the application, was transparent, a short essay on your favorite 3 cheeses, the wines you'd pair them with, what your favorite black and white French film was, a bit much, and dropping off resumes, again and again, in unlikely doorways to women 30 years my junior who check it as if to make sure I have some qualifications, experience, how flattering...
I go out now armed with 20 resumes, I used to hate this, would apply for a job and get it, hated turning down job offers because I'd over-applied, but that hasn't happened in a long time. As you get older and older it becomes more and more like looking for gold, the industry prefers the young and beautiful, not the old and decrepit, and, wandering into one restaurant on 17th that seems to have weathered the storms I get it, an old clown in a white shirt and black vest, bald head, literally a clown, the saddest waiter the world has ever seen, and man oh man do I understand...
Being chased by a T-Rex
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 880
I'm a passenger in a car being driven down the 3A, sitting in the back seat, and we're being chased by a T-Rex...bigger than a T-Rex even, huge, and it's bearing down on us and I'm crouched on the floor with a tiny axe yelling to the driver "Just stop the car and I'll whack it!" but the driver won't stop, and as fast as he's going the T-Rex is keeping up, alongside us now and roaring through the windows, it'll rip the top off the car and me and my tiny axe, we don't stand a chance...
Long day out handing out resumes, everywhere too busy, this is not the season to be looking for work. Got home exhausted, short nap, this was the result...
The Locker as Metaphor
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1301
I mean to go there daily. It's on the list. Every list, every day.
And most days I find a reason to avoid it...
The locker, it's not just a locker, it's a portal into my unconscious, a metaphor for my every disordered and dangling thought, 10,000 unfinished projects, unsorted arts and crafts, nick-knacks and memorabilia. To the casual eye it's all just junk, but like all enchantments nothing is as it seems...
Mnemosyne, Hades, I'm Orpheus, again and again returning to the cave, excavating paths, deadfall traps poised overhead, toppling boxes apprehended mid-flight by other boxes, cardboard arches filled with crockery, paint brushes, oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels, mixed media...
Unpacking memories, Eurydice, Eurydice, it's all memory, old photographs, letters, inaccessible memories stored in jumbles of towering boxes, a labyrinth of boxes splitting their sides, buckets running with sand, concentrates, bones and skeletons, chests of drawers and trunks and more chests, crates filled to the brim, ledgers, diaries of expenses, of trivial events, notebooks and sketches, boxes of books, remembered and forgotten, I need to unspool a ball of twine that I might find my way out again, through the overhanging shade, and tantalizing, always out of reach or at the bottom of some great stack or pyramid, another box, another crate, dig deeper, ever deeper...
There are CD's, boxes of CD's, CD ROMS, DVD's filled with music, .jpg's, .gif's, .mp3's and .mp4's, files, pictures, forgotten, lost, corrupted, in unreadable formats, on broken laptops, cameras, tablets, cellphones, flash drives and memory cards, SD, Micro SD, plastic shards of memory filled with copper teeth, unrecoverable, now a decade since last I opened, Vaults and Cupboards full of childhood toys, suitcases and closets full of discarded clothing, a box of stopped watches, shelves filled with old postcards, memberships and passports (and the daughter, assisting, recognizes not me but her brother), like Theseus and the Minotaur, unraveling, unpacking, ever deeper and deeper into the gloom, blind and searching, remembering, ...
Fill the car with boxes, don't check, don't look inside, they can be returned, there will be many trips back here, this place warrants a thousand excavations, sort through, file, discard, transcribe, sell, the work here, years to organize it all...
Life now is measured more by what I've forgotten than what I can remember, I had forgotten but now I remember in this intangible shade, this cave of shadows, of shifting umbras, the photographs of ghosts and music-box hauntings, while all the while digging deeper and deeper, this is where the treasures are. this: in the tomb of all ideas, ideals, I'm my own grave robber ...
each man kills the thing he loves
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Quotes
- Hits: 831
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
- From the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde, A bit long, a trifle didactic and repetitive, reminds me in rhyme and repetition of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". But a great line...
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