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Valentines, 2025
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 167
The week leading up, reservations. All told maybe 60, 70 people, 2 1/2 turns of the restaurant. Not too crazy, we should be able to manage fine.
A few days before, customer comes in for soup to go. She can see I'm unwell, not the best, and so is insistent that I get the chef to dish her soup to go out. I can touch nothing. Single-handedly I'm the plague, poisoning babies, killing villages, ...
I'm too sick to argue.
The same day, another lady, has a friend, can't eat gluten or rice, what do we have? I answer nothing. Not entirely true, but - close enough, and my patience for this is expired.
***
Valentines comes and it's a shit-show blown up beyond belief. Clearly and without precedent, without even a near comparison the worst Valentines I've worked in the industry. Ever.
There's a line up at the door all night. People without reservations, who thought they wouldn't need them, couples, families with strollers, people looking confused that a reservation might be required, "Why?", you can see it in their perplexed, offended faces.
The busiest day of the year, and why would you need a reservation? We manage to fit in perhaps 40 walk-ins, another 200 are left grumbling to go and try elsewhere.
***
Feb 14th, Saturday. Busy again, this time with people out to enjoy the live music and a few mocktails. A young couple come in, don't like their table, try and switch to a booth for 5. I tell them we're reserving that for a larger group, they get offended, leave, write an online review that calls me a "racist" for not letting them have the booth.
***
This industry, it's peak entitlement. Every idiot feels entitled to have their every idiocy pandered to. I'm done with it, maybe, at best, I've another 3, 4 months left, but I can't do it anymore. Now to begin looking for a way out...any commonality, of good manners, breeding, it's vanished and I'm exhausted.
Pneumonia
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 168
Over 2 weeks of feeling like shit, sleeping 16-18 hours plus a day, barely surviving every day at work.
I'm used to this, not "Used" to it, per-se, but more of the stoic philosophy that says ride it out until you get better, and sooner or later you'll wake up feeling a little (or a lot) better.
2 weeks, 2 days, until last Sunday I finally grab a cab and drag my sorry ass off to the hospital.
Work, they'd grown a little impatient with my misery, I had no choice, really.
The hospital, Emergency, 3 hours waiting to see a physician. The standard, and then some x-rays and it's Pneumonia.
Fine. Off to Shoppers to get a prescription, 5 days, 6 pills, I should be feeling fine around Thursday or Friday.
The week passes. Still sick as a dog, sleeping, work is to be barely survived, endured. All I want to do is to get home and back into bed. I eat out, nothing in my fridge, tacos, but they taste wretched and I've no appetite. Breakfast, same, food, generally, the same. I pick, fuss, eat a bit, and then go to bed. On a whim I go to the Co-op, buy 4 cans of Organic Soup, $5.00 per can, only it's as well garbage, I'm paying 10 cents for the can, 3 cents for the "organic" soup, which is nothing at all, for $5.00 in a restaurant you'd send it back, and you'd be right, and here I've filled a bag with this inedible nonsense. I'm too sick to cook and too sick not to.
The days are unendurably long. I'm not well. Not by a long shot. Thursday, working the day, collegue texts me that she'll be late. 4:30. 4:30 comes and passes, no show, 5:30, 6:30 and I'm on the phone with the owner, "Where the f@@#R! is .....", no call in, nothing, this place, it's murdering my every hope of survival.
I'm not happy.
A replacement is found, sent in to spell me off, and I'm home again to bed.
Friday I'm better. I've slept, not well, but better.
Dreams, by the way, for the week. No liquor, no cigarettes (well, maybe 5 per day). Most days simply pass out in bed, the night sweats, wake when you wake, no memory of dreams. But one night, that i'm in a well lit warehouse, hundreds of other generic souls boxing up cutlery, boxes, hundreds, no soul to this, a factory, machine.
Then the next night a dream in which all the things, court filings, papers, business, it's bursting out my wallets, I'm disorganized in the extreme, everything I've ignored these past few weeks due to being sick is now piled up in bulbous exploding wallets and I need to get organized, get my shit together...
...and I'm awake for an hour or so before I figure out this was a dream, a fever dream, and the fever, it's filling my waking and sleeping hours and I'm not able to find when I'm myself.
***
Friday, Valentines Day, Saturday, the day after. These are separate posts.
Sunday, my medicine, prescription, expired on Thursday, and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting better. And so I finally suck it up, cab once again to the hospital.
3 more hours, a physician, the hospital, today, it's full. The waiting room, full to the brim, no seating, and so 3 hours today, it's a blessing.
The last diagnosis, pneumonia, well, incorrect. They thought I had a more fashionable variant doing the rounds, prescribed accordingly, no, it seems I have the more classical variant.
I could have told them.
A new prescription, 2 pills, 3X a day, 5 days until I'm out.
Home to bed, take my pills, pass out.
Today, still exhausted but better able to manage reading a book, keeping on schedule with my pills. This will pass, for sure, but it's been so long since I've been myself, well, alive even, that I've forgotten and how will I know when I'm well again? Time will tell. Tomorrow, a double, merely have to survive and get through it...
A Touch of Zen
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 233
A 70's masterpiece of Japanese Martial Arts. A scholar finds himself caught up in a courtly intrigue. The best are the fluttering martial-arts scenes, which are all very well and fine until you realize that all these wonderful arial movements are facilitated by out of sight trampolines...
Still, charming. And the characters - of the Abbot, the General, the Princess, the Scholar, well...it creates the template for a lot of the movies to follow.
Baahubali - (2015, Hindii)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 248
And, because I am still sick and not capable of anything greater, watching this. Cheesy, silly, but at the same time remniscent of those old Saturday Matinee movies of old, like the original intent of "Indiana Jones" or "Star Wars", or the "7th Voyage of Sinbad: before they became "cult classics". Merely a good escape from reality done via cinema. To even attempt to review it is to miss the point.
Watching it online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4l2jLR7Y8Q&t=3453s
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