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Diving Board
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2035
I'm living in the outback in Australia, and just down the road there's an old swimming pool, and on top of it there's a giant diving board.
Squatters have moved in and they're having a party and so I take my daughter and we go down to visit. It's fun, the jungle all around, jumping off the board - it's really not so much a diving board as a platform or treehouse high above the pool. These squatters, they seem nice enough.
And I'm swimming with my daughter in the pool, on our backs and I'm beneath her, holding her up to the air because she doesn't swim so good and I'm having difficulty keeping us both alive and so I push her to the edge of the pool where she can hang on, then come up for air myself.
At night, when we're back home, we talk about the squatters. They've fixed up the pool well, and the diving board - well, it's a treehouse now hundreds of feet in the air, but someone wants to develop that area and they're to be evicted.
We're over visiting the next day, they know they're going to be evicted but they're not going. The guy of the treehouse, he's a beard and looks very granola, he shows me a cheque for $38,000 dollars, they're going to destroy the treehouse tomorrow and they want to pay them to leave. He wants to spend the money on a huge party, a grand act of defiance, but I tell him that maybe someone in his family will need it...
It's a beautiful day to be in the treehouse, jumping out from high above the swimming pool, splashing about, climbing back up and doing it again...
The next day they explode the treehouse. Everyone is killed, except the wife (his wife, Granola's), but she's disappeared someplace and no one knows where.
Auld Lang Syne
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2375
The New Year, and the standard heap of resolutions. How to set yourself up for failure.
Now I have the same yellowed piece of paper that I've had the past 20 odd years, filled with the things that need changing. I'll post it above the desk for a few weeks before taking it down and carefully laying aside so I can check my progress next year. Generally I find I can just reuse the old list.
This year there are a few additions - Unpack & cleaning being high amongst them. And so I've begun to clear a path through the office - there's no way I'll get EVERYTHING I have into that rather tiny space, and so there will have to be a selection process, then a pile of boxes will be filed downstairs. When the office is done then there's the living room, not so tough but again overdue, there's no living done there, rather it's more the private quarters of a particular cat. There are the renovations (the unpacking was to follow the renovations, but in the absence of any immediate progress I'll unpack. That's a sure charm certain to guarantee me all the luck I'll need finding my materials...).
So far the New Year is looking rather like the old year.
Advice to Writers
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 1638
This is good, and just in time for the New Year. Myself, I've resolved to write more, that's a daily thing, and there are some gems of inspiration here - writerly advice from writers to writers.
"Though our publishers will tell you that they are ever seeking “original” writers, nothing could be farther from the truth. What they want is more of the same, only thinly disguised. They most certainly do not want another Faulkner, another Melville, another Thoreau, another Whitman. What the public wants, no one knows. Not even the publishers."
-HENRY MILLER
Link: Advice to Writers
Link: Tweets / Advice to Writers on Twitter (Careful - there are so many GOOD links to follow here you might never get back to writing...)
dropping off the painting
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2612
I haven't been back to the restaurant for a few weeks, 6 maybe, I've been haunted by the painting of the owner's daughter in my kitchen.
But it's time, and I'll be damned glad to be rid of it.
G is back, the G who walked out the few days before my final departure, he completes the team: Everyone is now back that has left (in the front at least), and there are some new faces as well. I catch up with the boys, the Boss's nephew and G, the girl I trained up as my replacement (looking much slimmer and quite attractive, exercise, it would seem, agrees with her), the kitchen and the suppliers are the same, we drink coffee, chat, gossip about who's come and gone (nobody important), laugh about G's departure, and like Franco his return.
The Owner returns, and there's the customary Christmas pleasantries, I give him his painting.
There's the puzzlement on his face and I explain that it's his daughter. "See" I say "2 Eyes....how many does your daughter have?..." And I go through my trademarked spiel until he's forced to concede there's a resemblance.
"Maybe" I suggest "Your daughter should have plastic surgery..." but he doesn't hear me.
"Wait" he says and whistles "Until my wife sees this....".
The boss's nephew, he likes my stuff, he wants me to do his portrait next...
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