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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1780
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 ...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1659
And I'm trying to find old music, links, information that I dimly remember from a decade or so before.
An old music video, popular in Prague, Fall of '93. Searching, searching, I can find nothing.
Another, an old piece of music from Paris, bookmarked on a computer that died a long time ago. And a long list of favorite links that died with it.
To watch a home movie, recorded on an old webcam, format not longer supported, or the blistering foil on the CD making it unplayable.
Trying to find these lost souvenirs of my life, lost to time and place and increasingly the failings and shortcomings of the digital age. Lost, lost, the digital afterworld proving to be a an unreliable shifting memory...photos, however bleached, can still be held, records can still be played and film can be restored, but these early years of internet and innovation, they're somehow both dimly remembered and lost forever...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1523
Finally, the sad and necessary end to the this portion of Kootenay adventure. To live here I need to increase my income by a couple of orders of magnitude. Find a different livelihood. A year, maybe 2 in Calgary to wrap up my affairs - see the daughter off to college - empty my locker, reduce my baggage, wrap up countless creative projects and make my plan to return. Finally, after 2 years living on sofas, under bridges, in buses, guesthouses, trailers, dingy staff accommodations, by the side of the highway and off logging cuts, tents and roommates, time again for a place of my own.
The pub, I'll miss it, sort of, some of the people, the more unique characters and nut-jobs that fill the area, some of my co-workers, but this is not why I came here and it's worn it's own rut, time to move on, when I return it'll be to the Valley side, a place, however humble, of my own, but I've a couple years now to plan for that.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1625
OK. I've been away - and further than that, but even while away I was making notes. Pen and paper styled notes, rocking it old school. So - if a lot of the information I'm giving you is out of date, old news, been-there, done-that, then feel free to pass it by. I would. Life is short. Just saying...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1619
Labour Day weekend is the end. Holiday Monday Afternoon, busy busy busy, by the evening we're dead. Summer is over. It's that sudden, as if you drove off a cliff at 60 Miles per hour, and that evening we begin to see a few of the local regulars, they know when it's safe to come out. The rest of the week, not bad for 1 server, but a far cry from the craziness that required 3 servers to barely keep up. It's the end.
I've 7 weeks to go, and I need a vehicle real bad...