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In a house with my father not-my-father and son not-my-son
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1256
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...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 797
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
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 725
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
Light unto the end of the Universe...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 712
Or, more simply put - Olbers's Paradox. If the sky is filled with stars - and it is - then why at night is it dark?
To quote the Wiki:
The theory that the night sky should be filled with light from the infinitude of stars that present themselves....
Arguments that explain it away:
#1) Big Bang - time has not allowed the light to reach here.
Nope. I hate to say it but I don't buy the Big Bang theory. There are problems with it. Many, many problems, too many to lay out here. But before you second guess my skepticism let me remind you that it's losing it's cache even as we're talking now -
#2) Gravity could deflect and concentrate those infinitude of tiny, distant stars into larger and larger stars, merging the wavelengths of a thousand distant stars into one - or black holes could deflect and suck the light in, creating black voids.
This is probably true. But true for many instances does not explain all the instances. Maybe it does? But while we're brainstorming here...
#3) That as light travels, it shifts red or blue - coming towards us, heading away from us. And that shift takes it off the visible spectrum. So the night sky is in fact filled with light, but beyond the spectrums our eyes can see.
So the night sky presents itself to us as black but is in fact filled with more colors than our eyes can perceive.
More below:
via Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-night-sky-dark/
via Emma Osborne: https://www.ogdentrust.com/assets/media/THS_Emma_Osborne_Physics_Essay_-_Olbers_paradox.pdf
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