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Buried in Money
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2327
He was a good looking kid, young, under 30, fit, he had it all. No shit, had it all, his father, one of the owner's best friends, 10 or 11 figures easy, owned a nationwide company, made him VP even though all he could do was pick up uniforms and drop of laundry. He was the heir-apparent.
But he had problems. Lots of problems, going way back, problems that the seemingly infinite supply of money only ever made worse. We all knew him, he was a junkie, in and out of rehab, the finest clinics, spas really, in the states. Dad Paid. He had parties, crazy parties, in his multi-million dollar penthouse downtown. Not the kind of party regulars you expect in a multi-million dollar penthouse, but this wasn't the typical million dollar penthouse. A 53" TV, no couch or chairs, no furniture, really, a variety of party goers that all, more or less, fit into the same type. The same as you'd run into in any crackhouse. Only here 50 stories up doing lines off of marble countertops and tweaking for days watching the sunrise over the mountains and the stars of the city fade...
His life, when you looked into it, was a series of bumblefuck accidents. By accidents I mean the predictable outcomes to a life lived without responsibility or consequence. He'd run a man down when he was a teenager, trying to get out of having a fight. There were other things. Everything that money could buy, and nothing that it couldn't. He lacked character, integrity, purpose. Whatever he wanted was given to him. The finest of cars, of accommodations, of worry free high rise living, an allowance, the best looking of crack-whore girlfriends...
***
No one was surprised, he hadn't shown up at work, answered texts, dad broke into the penthouse with the building manager and some cops, it looked an awful lot like Suicide by OD. He'd closed his social media to comments, there were other things going on....
***
Everyone felt bad for his dad. I mean, he had his failings, for sure, he caused G*** to get fired, for one, and an awful lot of other ones, but you could never wish this upon anyone. And he's blaming himself, doesn't understand why, the kid had everything...
***
Everyone else knows, the kid had everything given to him, this is, was the problem, everyone knows it, hard to feel sorry for the poor little rich kid, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but they are quiet when he's around, commiserate, but you here them talking afterwards...
***
After the funeral, the shit begins. The crack-whore girlfriend steals the dog, gets a warrant saying that she was left the apartment, the car, everything, they lived together forever, many years (it was at most a couple of months), other claimants step forward, everyone wants a piece of him, most have transparent claims, trumped up lies, easily disproved, but the police show up for each of them anyways, they're not thinkers, standard warrant-less searches, intimidation, J***, he's out of his league but he's got an expensive lawyer so things are sorted out pretty quick...
***
The Nephew remembers when his son would call him at 5:00 in the morning, addled out of his mind, talking about all the things he'd buy when he inherited, sold the company, A Maserati, A Lamborghini, A Ferrari, A Land Rover, there would be a parade down Centre Street and it would snow cocaine upon the whole city every Xmas ... if only his goddamned dad would die...
***
And J***, it's been a few weeks, the only child he has that actually spoke to him, hadn't done him wrong, and he's begun the unremembrance of reality, the attributions of imagined battles and saintliness "I'm a Gladiator...just like *****" and you stare at him in disbelief, ***** a gladiator? A gladiator that was given every weapon in the arsenal and after staggering into the arena under the weight of admiration and wealth promptly fell upon his sword...
Excavating a library...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2031
I'm in London not London, the abundant tubes leading out of the city, travelling around but I'm not recognizing any of it, none of it at all, it's not as I remembered...
I find a large vacant lot, much of it torn up by excavators, half of an old building still standing, it reminds me curiously of the new condo developments near the Hillhurst Community Center...
...Anyways, I have permission to be here, going in amongst the big piles of dirt being excavated I can see the giant ends of old books buried in the mud, I climb the hill and begin to pull out the books, I'm free to salvage what I can...
...the first find, giant, old pages, 200 pages at least, and I pull it from the muck and read the words and I'm thinking it's by Salman Rushdie, that can't be, this is far older than him, some odes to Satan or some such, not time to read, work is off for today but they're not stopping for me...I take it down the hill to a table I've set up, there's a cute blonde there and I'm showing her what I've found, I don't know her but she's agreeable and interested...
...Back up, into the muddy hillside, pulling out more books....and then I'm inside the tenement building, what hasn't yet been torn down, there's books here as well, odds and endments, some CD's, games I recognize from my previous life and I'm annoyed they've been left here, bits of me I'd forgotten about, there's an old book, about (???), and another, I'm pulling it apart, handwritten, a curiosity, scrapbook of somebodies life, handwritten and illustrated with artworks, and around every letter written in the book there's a picture or a story written, there are decoupage and paintings and other trifles of the authors life (a she, I'm presuming), I'm trying to date it, guess when she lived and wrote it, I'm convinced it's valuable, priceless, but I'm in a hurry, I resolve merely to gather it beneath the covers of another old book, I can discover it later, there's an antique typewriter, with a large brass screen above an ugly 50's keyboard and the logo "Royale" written in Gold letters, unplugging the typewriter (and someone is telling me there's a sheet of paper inside, between the brass screens, I don't check it, there's no time) I see the light fading beautifully behind the "Royale" logo, from between the screens where the sheet of paper is, I can do something with this, I will take it with me, to an airport with the books and ship them back to Canada before I go to Europe...
Pellucidar - Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1880
I found it at a thrift shop, Dover reprint, and I picked it up because when I was a kid I was crazy for this sort of stuff.
By the time I was 12 I'd read almost the entire children's library, and some of the books that I hadn't included Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I knew who Tarzan was, of course, who doesn't? But I wasn't that interested. Nonetheless, it was getting down to Tarzan or nothing, so I checked out a few of the books.
And I loved them...
I mean, I read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Tarzan books, the John Carter on Mars, the Moon Maidens, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, I'm pretty sure the library didn't have them all, but what they had, I read.
I loved 'em all.
So when I got to be twenty-ish I revisited them. Specifically Tarzan. And I found them painful, awkward to read, horrible, just appalling...
I blame my fancy highbrow European tastes, I'd been reading the English authors, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maughm, George Orwell, any number of other authors, Vladimir Nabokov...clearly I was raising the bar...
When I had my son, perhaps when he was 10 or 12, I gave him a couple of dozen original dime-store Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books I'd found at a garage sale. He pretended to try and read and then discarded, they weren't to his taste, what can you do?
But finding this, the Dover reprint, slender, the adventures of David Innes and company at the Earth's core, I couldn't resist. I'd try him again.
And, a slender book, filled with original, novel ideas, poorly executed and even more poorly recorded...psychological gold, this, the primitive, stone age and reptilian races at the earth's core, the beast-man named "Gr-gr-gr", the thags and dinosaurs, the inwardly curving horizon and the stationary hovering moon, but, like Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera" it's also literary torture. The brilliant device of the author addressing a letter of criticism from a fan at the beginning (who turns to a believer when he sees the evidence the author provides) is undermined by it's execution, and perhaps it's wrong of me to judge as Burroughs himself never aspired to be more than a pulp-fiction writer, in any case, intriguing for the ideas, and he did have some great ideas, but for the most part these books will have to remain in memory and childhood...
U of A offers Spoonbending Course
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: WTF
- Hits: 1946
They really should have offered this to the Undergraduates first. There would have been less of an uproar. And regarding the assertion: "There is absolutely no physical way you can bend a spoon with your mind" Sir/Madame - I would suggest you watch "The Matrix" again. And grab a spoon with two hands, one hand on the shaft, the other on the bowl. Apply pressure. ???. The result, dear Mr/Mrs/Ms, is clearly a result of your intentions, or mind. Discard the intermediaries of hand and force, you did this with your mind. Now chill...
I think it would have been far more interesting if all the "doctors"/"students" had been allowed to take the course and then review it...
PS: I know there are diamonds here, regardless of whatever other bollocks course they offer...
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