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Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Kootenay Style
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1908
It's a different place, for sure.
I mean, there are people that have lived here 30 years and don't have winter tires or four wheel drive. It's insane. There are few places on earth where it would be more important, yet they still don't, haven't gotten around to it, can't afford to, other priorities...
Crazy.
And there are people that hold down regular jobs by hitchhiking the 20 or 30 KM to work a day. Hitchhiking is considered a reliable means of transport.
Crazy.
If you own land and have a bunch of abandoned trailers or school buses you're a fucking landlord.
Crazy.
But this is the best, and the one that I hear most often (and am frequently guilty of myself, showing a dire acclimatization...) -
"What day is it?"
Meaning what day of the week of it is it. If you were to do a Kootenay-Styled "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" you'd open with that question.
Then you'd follow it with "What's the date?" and I can tell you there's nobody here that would get the answer to that question without checking at least one or two of their lifelines.
Then, finally, for a million dollars, you'd ask them the year. Because, hell, if they knew the day, date and year they'd let you keep your million dollars, out here, if they could answer all three of those questions on their own they'd be millionaires on their own initiative...
Memory: A Swimming Pool with Crabs, Plastic Plane, Disney
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1407
One of my earliest memories, living with my mother, a high rise apartment somewhere in Victoria, cereal for breakfast, a plastic jet surprise inside that I could keep.
This excited me.
And outside, on the balcony, a shallow swimming pool filled with water and sand and all the little creatures I had gathered from the beach, crabs, starfish, that would soon die, I was too young to understand the consequences...
A small T.V., black and white, the Wonderful World of Disney, looking at it over the kitchen table...
At L*****-not-L*****'s
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1419
It's not her house at all, not even a little bit, and I don't know why I think it is. She's not there. It must be the mess, there's a half eaten banana on the floor, one of her pets doubtless, and a bunch of half-eaten snails on the floor, dropping right there onto the wood in front of me, while I'm watching, and I'm thinking it's maybe her cat or her hedgehog, not her hedgehog, her daughters, do hedgehogs eat snails? And it's strange, it's not so messy, there's very little furniture, mostly floor, and the lighting, it's the yellow light of memory...
I go to the bathroom, small, dingy, lit in cigarette tones of yellowed nicotine, ...
Back into the living room, post-war wooden flooring, long rooms, bigger than a bungalow, not her place at all...
...back into the bathroom, it's changed, now there's a double wide chest to floor crazed porcelain urinal, still the same yellow light of childhood, memory, behind me there are a couple of doors that lead into bedrooms, one of them might be mine, old paint walls, wooden doors, I know this place from another dream...
I go out into the backyard. It must be spring or fall, the trees and grass are all still brown...There are neighbors, they're having a BBQ, a bunch of them standing around in the yard, and so I walk into it, there's all sorts of stuff there, looks like a garage sale, I poke through the stuff, trying not to poke through, not to be intrusive, it might not be a garage sale after all, mostly old 70s junk anyways, nothing good, ...
...out the back of their yard, and I'm on the banks of Kootenay Lake, only here it's a river, it's high or it's low, raging, there's an island just a dozen or so yards offshore, I want to get to it, but the lake, the river, its waves are higher than the banks, 5 feet, deep blue, green, there's no way I can swim or wade across...
Places-Not-Places
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1604
There is a strange connectedness between the places in my dreams that is almost the same as the places in my waking, in my dreams I remember places that are not the places I've been to, I remember them differently, more through emotion, or the deformations of ripples in a pond, as if seeing the place again in wavy and broken reflections, there are pieces of these places that are the same, and I know my routes through them, walking through I remember, and remember again their place in a previous dream, a dream I won't recall when I've awoken, only the familiar, haunting sense of having been there before.
My dreams are a maze, a labyrinth, but there is a congruency, a map that can be drawn through them if you return there enough, and if I could figure it out well enough a correlation of places, a symbolscape that intertwines and weaves metaphor with memory, London-Not-London, Edmonton-Not-Edmonton, Calgary-Not-Calgary, and as of late now Nelson-Not-Nelson. I need to begin drawing these, putting them together, assembling the puzzle, and naturally I think of maps, but maps, they are static, maps to these places are fluid, they are never complete, they fit like a jigsaw only in dreaming and I can't always find my way...
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