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The combined weight of small things
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2348
An 8:10 appointment at the dentist.
And I'm up at 6:00 AM, just to be safe, leave the house at 7:30 to allow for traffic. You don't want to be late for the dentist.
Outside, still dark, cold, go to scrape the windows. Open door, close door, drivers side window explodes. Completely explodes.
This is a 2008 VW Rabbit, if you're curious.
Now I'm annoyed, more than annoyed, and I'm late, so I think of calling my dentist to cancel (but you pay regardless) and so I hastily sweep the glass up off the street, throw a leather coat on the seat so I don't get cut on the broken glass, and make my dentist appointment only 10 minutes late.
Then home, call the dealership. "How did this happen?" I ask, because I'm curious, in almost 30 years of driving I've never seen the spontaneous explosion of a car window. They don't know. But it will be around $700 to fix. And I have to drive out and prepay for the part to be ordered.
I'm in a bit of a rage, really. Since taking on my unemployment the single biggest expense has been this fucking car. $500.00 to repair the hail damage, and I didn't drive it for 3 weeks. Now $700.00 + maintenance for another act of God (or shitty engineering by Volkswagen). All told I calculate with all expenses considered it's about $100.00 every fucking time I get into this car, and I'm not making the payments. I should really entomb the car in glass and go back to the restaurant to make payments on it. It's my own private Juggernaut, the unaffordable symbol of crap western manufacture and crass commercialism. It's not worth driving because, frankly, even working 18 hours a day I couldn't afford the freaking expense.
Now to the carwash to try and vacuum out the ten million shards of glass that litter the car seat and floor, buy some plastic to tape over the window (because this won't be repaired anytime soon), go and prepay for the window to be ordered...
So begins my day.
Aunt Madge
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1814
I'm running after "Bunny", the lead CSI, we've found the car, a crumpled folded picnic table and her trailer and we think we might be onto something.
We're looking for Auntie Madge. She'd disappeared some while ago, met an unsavory end with a serial killer or something, but still there were reports of her car being seen here and there; the northern states, Montana, Oregon, and now, finally, here, at the end of this cul-de-sac surrounded by high trees.
There's a broken fence and Bunny's running towards it, I'm following, there's a few missing planks, it's broken up and weathered and we go through the holes and run up a long driveway and there's an old hotel, decrepit, ancient.
It has the air of a once-great hotel, but that's long passed, and Bunny is running down the halls, through a courtyard, and we're at the desk.
It's the Hotel Renfrew. There's an old guy, balding, fat, sweaty at the desk, leaning back in his chair and smoking. Bunny asks about Aunt Madge and he answers, directs us down the hall and I'm surprised, it seems almost too good to be true that she'd be alive and staying here in the middle of nowhere, we go down the halls and find her room.
Inside there's a younger lady, late 30's or early forties, in jeans and a black bra. And there's Aunt Madge as well, older, in the same black bra and jeans. They weren't expecting us. The younger lady, she has one breast, small and round, the size of a tennis ball. And the other is huge and round, like a cantaloupe, I can't help but notice. And then she turns towards me and I see there's a third breast, again small and round like a tennis ball, and it somehow balances everything out. I notice Aunt Madge now, she's got 3, maybe 4 breasts all scattered around her chest and belly and she's telling Bunny that they disappeared because of the taboo, they just wanted to be themselves, and I'm wondering if the taboo was on their obvious lesbian relationship or on their multiplicity of breasts....
The man at the front desk now, he's telling us about a cleansing ceremony the Buddhists will be doing on Dead Island, I ask where that is and he gestures off towards the south, "But you won't find anything, it's all gone now.." and I guess, infer somehow, that the history of this hotel has the midwives abandoning the many teated children of this area to the elements on the island, but they don't want to discuss it.
80 Million Dollars worth of Picassos
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1974
An electrician approaches the Picasso estate to validate a number of Picasso's artworks, given to him, he said, when he worked for Picasso during the 1970's. The collection is already appraised at 80 million dollars, many of the works are completely unknown.
The family argues theft, that there's no way that Picasso would have given these paintings to an electrician. SO begins what will probably be a long and drawn out legal battle, but the point of it is there's a eighty million dollar cache of art that was previously unknown. Which raises the question, how many other hidden and unknown caches of art are out there?
Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com
VS Van Gogh
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2579
Sometimes I goad myself into working by comparing my life, to date, with Van Goghs.
It's a reminder of how easy I really have it.
Van Gogh: Dead at 37.
Me: Alive at forty-odd.
Van Gogh: Candlelight & Gaslight. Painting mostly limited to daylight hours.
Me: Alive in the time of Electricity. Could paint 24/7 if I were so inclined...
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