Home
Richard Pryor's Hairy Ass
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1409
I'm in a room speaking to an older woman, her husband designed the 1949 Silver Canadian Dime. It looks just like the regular dime, but the queen's head is split into half, the one half the same formal representation on every dime, the other half is a sort of Matisse - styled abstraction, a bit like the figure on the French Centime...I'm impressed, I don't know why, this isn't something that would ordinarily impress me, I ask her how many were minted but she postpones my questions for her husband, I look around her house, it's nice, darker, furnished with fine antiques and paintings, she gives me a dime to keep....
And now I'm escaping from someone, don't know or remember who, I duck into a church, the 7th Day Adventists...It's like a church basement, no chairs, people sitting in the middle of the floor, too brightly lit....
Richard Pryor is there, he's naked and conducting a sort of Bingo, everyone's got some sort of scratch card with a bunch of different playing cards depicted on them, he's calling numbers and they scratch off the corresponding card...I decide to play to pass the time while hiding out....
He turns around, and while I shouldn't look I can't help but notice how hairy his ass is, really, a beard that grows down between his legs and balls, but nobody seems to mind...
The Nibelungenlied
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1336
Curious, 12th or 13th Century tale of the death of Siegfried and the subsequent revenge by Kriemhild upon the treacherous Hagen. Filled with a sort of cartoonish, Hollywood style of violence wherein the protagonists prevail (for a time) against seemingly insurmountable odds, introducing and slightly fleshing out characters such as Brunhild and Rudiger, it served as my introduction to the medieval German myths and legends. Now, to be truthful, while it's a classic I wasn't overwhelmed by it, the translation I read (A. T. Hatto) sought to preserve the narrative at the expense of the poetry, and not speaking medieval German I'm not in a position to comment on whether he did a good or a bad job, I suspect the former. But it was redeemed in the numerous appendices and footnotes, which clarified and interpreted certain passages and generally raised my estimitation of it.
Now the introduction is often, in my view, something to be avoided, it frequently presumes you are familiar with the plot and outcome of the story and makes free with spilling events and offering criticisms and interpretations before you've had a chance to appraise it yourself. But in this instance the introduction and notes were saved until the end, where they served the proper function of clarifying the text and comparing the outline with the various antecedent poems and stories that preceded it. Which was a good thing.
Or is it? While I don't like "spoilers", it should be noted that it's original audience was very familiar with the plot, and the telling of the story was simply a different "interpretation" or fleshing out/tying together of various of the legends surrounding Siegfried and the Burgundians. So in this sense, to have the same appreciation as it's audience, forewarned might have been forearmed....
Other observations? Curious as to the events that actually led to the creation of the myths of Siegried and Kriemhild, curious as to how the audience reconciles the 2 halves, the first in which Siegfried is the hero treacherously murdered, Kriemhild the cruelly widowed Queen, then the second half where she weds King Etzel and becomes a vengeful sort of demon who sacrifices all in her quest for revenge, Hagen's role switches from that of traitor to that of hero... But then these become questions of our culture and time, and my absence of sympathy is largely due to my lack of understanding and context.
And the treasure of the Nibelung's, Kriemhild's dowry from Siegfried sunken into the Rhine...
Francis Parkman - The Oregon Trail - Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1309
An interesting read, in the genre of "Travel Literature", a firsthand account of the prairies and the Oregon Trail as recounted by Francis Parkman, circa 1845.
Colorful locations and characters, and a world that while only a 165-odd years ago might as well have been the ice age...Fierce and savage Indian tribes, Buffalo herds numbering in the tens of thousands, and everywhere they went wildlife...dozens of snakes underfoot, a cup of water taken from a stream is filled with tadpoles and frogs, and where the author notes there is no game to be shot he clarifies "No buffalo, deer or antelope", because always there are the wolves, the coyotes, the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes....
And I think, I've been to these places, some of which are still wild, yet where is the game now? It's rare enough to spot a frog or snake in the wildest of places, and the buffalo have long been gone from the prairie...
Weedeater
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 1464
My friend, JN, wanted me to meet him.
We were 16. It was at the now defunct Heritage Mall in South Edmonton.
"He is so coool." he tells me. "His name is Weedeater...."
So I go along and meet him. And as the name might imply, he was a heavy stoner. Wearing a flannel lumberjack jacket, small, slender, perhaps mid 20's with a 5 day growth of beard on his face, greasy blondish hair. crazy eyes. He was a nut. But my friend, JN, liked him, he'd met him at the mall and been ever so impressed.....
When you're 15 you're easily impressed.
Weedeater was going to get us some weapons. Stilettos, switchblades, nunchuks, he had them all.
God knows what we needed weapons for, but the thought of weapons, illegal weapons, somehow excited us...
Weedeater was enjoying his new-found celebrity. So what if we were a couple of 15 year old idiots? Someone appreciated him. He smiled as he peeled the burger off my friends bun, licked the mayonnaise from it and swallowed it whole....
"Didja see that?" JN said later... "He just peeled the burger and ate it ... like he didn't care...."
I wasn't so impressed by that. But I was impressed by the inventory of goods that Weedeater, or "Weed" for short, professed to be able to get. We could start our own gang....
Weedeater arranged to meet us at the arcade in the mall the following week. He'd bring a bag full of Stilettos. $25.00 apiece, they'd cut through a 2X4 at the push of a button...
We met as promised, Weed showed, but there weren't any weapons. There'd been a problem. He'd need some money up front. Maybe $100.00. Trouble at the border. Complications, he didn't want to talk, didn't want to implicate us any more than he had to....
JN was in. "Weed" was his new best friend. Who knows, if we started with the stilettos, we could end up with better stuff...AK47's. hand grenades....
Weedeater nodded knowingly. he could get this stuff too....but he'd need the money up front...
$100.00 was a lot of money when you're working in a mall earning $3.45 an hour. But we were in. We met Weedeater, or "Weed" as JN now called him, outside the arcade in the mall, gave him the money, arranged to meet the following week ....
And that was the last we ever saw of him.
Page 938 of 1020