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A mania for paper
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2303
I have a certain mania for paper. I make notes to myself on scraps of paper, sketches, lists - things to buy, to do, occasions, addresses, I buy notebooks and try to organize myself with them, filling them with scraps, try to order my thoughts so that each thought finds it's related notebook, the notebooks pile up, I have now 5, 6, 7... boxes filled with notebooks and scraps of paper, post it notes, under my desk.
I hope to file them one day, go through them, move the ideas onto the computer where they won't fill the office, sort them into folders, briefcases, map them, notes for plays, books, poems, paid bills, rants...
Some are just the small notebooks, filled with things I should remember to buy next time I'm in Egypt, India, Japan...at first a small notebook for all the countries, later several small notebooks, one for each country. Then there are the coil-bound notebooks, song-cycles, poems, there are the gift notebooks, from people who wanted to encourage me to write, these are largely untouched, expensive hand-embossed Italian leather, I want to write in them as well, but they need a more finished product, they are expensive and so worthy only of the finest, distilled thoughts. There are scraps from sketch pads, watercolor, calligraphy paper, torn pieces of drawings I thought worth preserving, Ideas not completely worked out in final concept, these are stuffed randomly into other notebooks. There are address books, several, I've thought to marry them a few times, edit them to reflect my current realm of acquaintance, letters, old suitcases full of lapsed correspondences, memories, postage stamps and postcards, old photographs, there are the day timers, records of days and years past, how much I earned, spent, there are old passports, birth & baptismal certificates, print-offs from the computer, all piled together, jammed into boxes.
There are lists, shopping lists, movies to see, books to read, plays to attend, places to go, various failed attempts to prioritize my finances, old bills, envelopes, clippings from newspapers and catelogues....
I need a secretary.
A waterfall filled with watches
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1720
This was a long dream last night, with several parts, I woke at 2:00 AM to write it down in part, but have a crushing headache, notes were scanty.
J***, the boys step father, has pulled up in his white truck to drop the boy off. I invite him in for a beer, he accepts, I tell him follow the boy inside, I'll just have to run to the store....I don't have any beer on hand, must go buy some.
And now I am returning on foot from someplace deep in Southeast Calgary, across the Deerfoot trail, I'm cutting through some sort of amusement or theme park, large green trees everywhere, old buildings filled with old machinery, my children are somewhere up ahead. It's a weekend. I keep running into construction workers, people I've worked with on odd jobs about the city, they seem friendly enough and remember me, I remember them only vaguely but they say hi and remember where we've worked together, they seem happy enough. The beer has been forgotten. Leaving the park, there are 3 bridges I must cross to get home, but I first must climb these steps up a large hill, on either side is a man-made terraced waterfall, filled with vintage watches, most of them are free for the taking, some are seperately priced. I stop to look at some, pulling them out of the water, the seperately priced ones are in plastic baggies nailed into the concrete. They are all interesting, unique, but no-name brands, not worth the repairing, I haven't time to look at them all, I remember having been here once before with D** and wonder how I've forgotten about it. I get to the top of the stairs, now in a long promenade of green trees, there is a group of husky 15 and 16 year olds coming up the stairs behind me, shouting taunts and insults, I think to ignore them, wonder why their doing this, then decide to wait for them, teach them a lesson. They reach the top of the stairs and I knock one of them down, they are surprised, hurt, offended, they weren't directing their comments at me, they were talking to a group of youths ahead of me, I am friends with their mother, (I look down the stairs now and see a 37 year old blonde, she waves and then turns shyly away), we feel bad about the misunderstanding.
I keep going, the children always just ahead of me, Calgary becomes again the real Calgary, not the dreamscape of bridges and trees, I am closer to home...
Richard Feynmann - Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1755
2 books on my bedside table, the first - Richard Feynman, - "Surely your joking, Mr. Feynman" - the autobiography of the Nobel Prize winning physicist, an easy read, enjoyable principally because of the fascinating character that Mr. Feynman was.
And the other, the collected letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, (edited) - the "edited" offends me, I want to know what was left out. I'm reading the Feynman book to stall the reading of Van Gogh's letters, already they have me rapt and I am savouring, delaying the sadness that comes with finishing a great read.
Secret Agent
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1832
N*** is upstairs in the kitchen.
I'm in the basement. It's a dark decrepit basement suite-type affair, brightly lit with an unshaded single bulb on the ceiling, dark corners, the lighting is theatrical. I'm meeting, beneath the bulb, 2 people in suits, generic people, unrecognizable, one is a man, the other a woman. I think the woman is asian, but it's unimportant.
They want me to be a secret agent. The woman explains that I need to spend the next year in the basement training, they've assigned someone to work with me...I have to learn over 100 martial arts.
It seems like a lot, but the woman explains "Many of them are only a paragraph long" and I accept this.
The woman that works with me, she's dark, full figured, a pastiche of women I've known, we're still in the basement, every day it's the same, we wake up, she wants to have sex, I'm concerned because she's not teaching me anything - "Don't worry about it" she tells me, the same basement, dark in the corners, brightly lit in the center with an unshaded lightbulb, sex is routine, mechanical, a job...
It's been a year, N*** is still upstairs in the sunny kitchen, peeling onions, cooking food....She's quietly angry with me. The girl with me in the basement is still training me, she doesn't see a problem with this, every day is the same...
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