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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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And now, a few days of nice weather and it's begun, the annual migration of the homeless, and I'm wondering how they all get here and where did they come from? Who stops to pick up someone pushing 2 shopping carts filled to the brim with trash, or someone spattered in blood and feces and with the classic opioid stoop?
It kills me because the town can barely afford to feed it's own homeless contingents, the year 'rounders, the locals, without these hundreds of new arrivals. But spring is here and summer not to far behind...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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While I'm no longer working there I still get news from the old restaurant. The one in Balfour. That they hired a new chef, brought him out from Cranbrook, moved him into the basement where Sean OD'd, and it took him under a week to discover that he has cancer.
That whole workplace is toxic AF. If anything would give you cancer, this would be it, no doubt.
And that they hired a new waiter, he works doubles all day Thursday and Monday because JR., he has to be in Cranbrook, he's gotten a "Government Job".
They're making lots of promises to this new waiter, he's going to be manager, in charge, everything, it's his show....
I've heard all this before, but the "Government Job" rather intrigues me, and while I have a theory I think it best to confirm...
I call the mother-in-law.
Now we're laughing and sure enough she confirms my suspicion. His "Government Job" is that he's on-call to stock shelves at the Liquor Store 3 days a week. BCLB. This is the "government job" his mom is bragging about.
I'm all for work, it is - for the vast majority of us - inevitable. But you get it. And BCLB - at best - is paying him $20 an hour. When he gets work. But it's important he be available for if and when they call. And he's already planned a summer vacation, so the job, well, he doesn't want it to get in the way...
This should be compared to the fact that even in the "shoulder" season - adding together wages and tips, and he'd be clearing very close to $50 an hour. Enough, in fact, that if he leaned into it he wouldn't even need to collect EI in the winter, he could haul the family off to Mexico and winter there.
Anyways, we're laughing at the absurdity of it all, about how the more shit changes the more it stays the same.
She's got other news related to the family. This is good. What is it?
Well, JR.'s wife has bought a stripper pole. And while I can't say (it's her daughter, after all) I'm thinking they'd better reinforce the ceiling, because there's no way that girl could get 2 feet off the ground under her own power. Maybe if she were on her back, but you don't need a stripper pole for that...
...oh, and she (the daughter) bought a silicon sex doll. Of a woman. They keep it in their bedroom. She's not happy because it's not very good looking...
...and again, you know what I'm thinking, how fucking great is your marriage that you'd rather have a lesbian affair with a Silicon Sex Doll than sleep with your husband, but - and this is the clincher - I get it.
And I'm laughing and laughing so hard, and she's feeding it, more details, absurd, gruesome, and this catch-up-call, it's killing me, and no sooner than I hang up having resolved to make it a weekly thing than I call Cathy - the other Alumni of Unspeakable Trauma, and share with her what I've found out...
Now, time for me to find work so I can afford to take my broke ass back out to Balfour with a bag of popcorn to sit back and enjoy the show...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Last year, when AI was big and trending (it still is, but I was just discovering it...) I set up my ChatGPT account and used Dall-E to create an image of a "Handsome late 50's older man".
Why I would do that is beyond me, there are mirrors...
Anyways, I plucked a suitable handless image and, suspicious of a lot of mine own friend requests on Facebook created a profile for my AI generated image.
I'd like to introduce you to my ridiculously popular AI friend Will Sharp.
I subsequently spent the next couple of days adding every friend Facebook suggested. I had to answer a very few messages - "How do I know you?" - or merely ignore them, or pretend briefly to be a wealthy man heavily invested in Crypto or Banking or something else equally absurd.
...and people got interested and started asking questions and I got bored of the deception, felt guilty anyways, and logged out of that account and forgot my password.
Now, when logged into my own Facebook profile I get alerts for him. It's been almost a year, and this 'man', who posts nothing, does nothing, has proven to be ridiculously popular. Dozens of friend requests a day, and when I left him (after a couple of days) he already had a few hundred friends. His throwaway email account fills up with friendship requests, status and photo updates from people neither he nor I have ever met (and probably other AI's), and occasionally concerned emails wondering where he's been. People that accepted without question the friendship request.
Nobody knows he's my imaginary friend, he's far too handsome and popular.
It's gotten on time to kill him, and I tried, only I forgot his Facebook Login information, it was on a whim, after all, and so I continue to get these little Facebook bubbles telling me how much is new in his world, what's going on, all of what his friends are up to, and while I'm glad he's doing well I can't help be a little envious because everyone I know on Facebook is a Wing-Nut or Doodle...
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I mean, I've been missing the days of quality journalism, Facebook, CNN, BBC, they can't deliver.
And I hearken back to the good 'ole days of Ed Anger and the "Weekly World News", which, for the time, seemed rather low-brow, all those aliens, Bat-Boy and Elvis sightings, and who would have thought the day would come when his views would be considered laughably "centrist".
This should be on a Tee Shirt. "I miss the compassionately informed reason and morality of Ed Anger". Or "I'm still mourning the death of quality, well balanced journalism" on a page-header with Bat-Boy or Elvis or maybe even Donald Trump.
Anyways, that's where we are at the moment.
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I found this on a wing nut I "unofficially" follow on Facebook.
A video from a local nut-job, whom I previously described - he makes his living (??) selling quack medicine & spiritual devices. Staff's as antennae to contact the gods, for a few thousand dollars apiece. His website, filled with video courses he offers (on nonsense, at ridiculous prices), T-Shirts of his own design, bargain priced at $88.00 apiece, other ridiculous items, priced into the thousands, ways to adjust you're "frequency", his tag-line is "My work exists at the frontiers of science, spirituality and art..." which is as well bullshit, "art" is a bit heavy handed, the science is invariably out of context, wrong or misquoted, and the spirituality, well, just because someone is telling you they're "enlightened" doesn't mean they are. Usually, in fact, it means the opposite.
Anyways, I was curious to see what the local nut job was up to, the post, an hour and a half long interview done by the fringes of the new-age wing-nut crazies.
So I listen. You'll recall that a couple of years ago (almost 3) his wife committed by jumping off of Pulpit Rock, his wife, one of the town beauties, a tragedy all round. He described it as "Her Leap to Freedom". Well, apparently she's been in contact, he had to wait a while but he figured it out - she's on Venus, contact is limited to the rotation of the earth and the conjunction of the planets, the heavenly spheres, she's in the nth heaven, yes, it's all easily explainable when you understand Dante and Feynman and Einstein and Bohr, the Gospels of ... and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the antimatter-positronic fofuf-a-tron postulated by ....
...measured, of course, in cubits, the underlying numerical harmony...
...because quantum...
...vibrations oscillating at a frequency of...
...epigenetics ensure the mitochondria will naturally...
...pituitary glands having regulated the chakras...
The nonsense is unending, and I'm trying to figure out if he's pretending, or if he actually believes this shit...
How is he not a doctor? I mean, he should just take the title, teach at a university, a psych college, make him a lecturer, allow him to explain his theories, then have the students explain just what the fuck is going on...
He quotes heavily from the Venutian Science Book - and yes, apparently it's a thing, and there's not just one: Link to Google Search Results.
You know the old saw, "don't judge a book by it's cover"....I can't help it.
It goes on, it's really a pitch for him to get funding, a go-fund-me, find sponsors, for a movie he wants to make about the afterlife, obviously he'll need a big budget, CGI, he's got a friend in California that can do it, $5,000,000 should cover it, his ex-wife has made all sorts of mathematical discoveries on the other side, from Venus, he's been doing horoscopes, can tell you, for a fee, where you'll go based upon your earthly existence, where and when you die, your own path of ascension...
He's building a website that will calculate the horoscopes for free, if only he can find patrons...
And so it goes, I skip through it, I'm missing nothing, it does seem to me that he's somehow found a way to capitalize on his wife's death, a new grift with which to plague the unwary and gullible.
This town, full of searchers and grifters, and god-damn I'm worried about finding a job?