Home

In a house with my father not-my-father and son not-my-son

Details

Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Dreams

Published: 30 October 2021

Hits: 1325

I'm in a house with my father not-my-father and son not-my-son. It's a smallish house, A-frame, and there's another house in the back lane on the same property. 

People live in the back house, I don't know them, their house, sunny, Kootenay style with lots of hanging suncatchers and outdoor plants. The yard between the two houses is small, and filled with all sorts of plants, flowers, rubbish. Clothes hanging on hooks on vines, and going through the clothes I find shirts of my father and of my son (younger, perhaps 11 or 12). 

My father-not-my-father is telling me to look out the back, he's having a driveway put in, and the back house is gone and I'm wondering where they went, the people that lived there, and why the landlord would consent to destroy a perfectly rentable house on his (?) property...

Looking up at the hill that's beside our house there's a hole in the ground, on the diagonal, with an old wooden coffin in it. "It's the ancestral burial ground of the people who lived in the back house" my father tells me, and then throws an old baby carrier up to cover the hole, the coffin was never buried, merely covered with trash.

I walk back through the yard, now that the back house is gone I discover that it's bigger than I expected, there's a hidden garden behind it...

And back in the yard I knew, sunny days, and I'm moving stuff and discovering unwashed dishes, old-granny style teacups and saucers, creamers filled with milk, everywhere, behind and around the outdoor furniture I'm finding trash, and I'm thinking this is very unlike my dad and these shirts of my son, why haven't I seen him, I understand he's my son but we should have met by now...

***Weird dream. I don't know who the other people were, only in the dream they were supposed to be my father and my son. They weren't, not at all, which accounts for the puzzlement and tone. Just fucking weird.***

A deer, hit by a minivan...

Details

Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 30 October 2021

Hits: 864

Today, a borrowed car and a few errands to thrift shops. Searching for Stormy Supplies, with little luck. Nothing of interest. 

Returning, through Castlegar, downtown, across from a copse of trees. There's a line of traffic, moving slowly. And a deer jumps out into the road - the van in front of me, going slowly - still manages to hit it. The deer, large, catapults 3, 4, 5 times in the air, lands in the middle of the lanes. Traffic both ways is halted. The deer, trying to get up, flips itself a couple of more times before landing on it's belly, front legs propping up it's head, it's back is snapped, it's going nowhere. Blood is coming out of it's mouth, tinting the froth that's building, and it's watching traffic. 

The driver of the van, he's pulled over, is gathering the bits of the van that flew off when he hit it. The deer is watching.  

Traffic slowly resumes around it, the deer, there's nothing we - anyone can do, but I'm surprised at how cavalier he is about gathering up the front of his van, the deer watching him, the cars go by, there's that shocked final look of intelligence in it's eyes.

Rosemary's Baby

Details

Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Film

Published: 28 October 2021

Hits: 795

How have I not seen this?

Anyways, I rather enjoyed it. The acting, a bit wooden, but the sets (rather, the period and location) I loved. The characters the actors rather woodenly (for the most part - Hutch was good) portrayed - were interesting, the apartment, furniture, people, mood, décor reflect my childhood. 

Which - all things told - was a far, far better time to be alive. A horror movie built upon the pleasant fictions or memories of my youth.

I'll take it any day to grim reality of the present.

Further reading on the tenants of "The Dakota" where much of it was filmed or set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota