The Week Past, and behind on all bills

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 18 October 2026

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Today my phone - yet again, is cut off because of reasons of non-payment.

As will be my power soon.

Work, 4 pay periods behind for a total probably around $2500. My account is empty, my meds running out, and I'm behind on every bill. This is absurd. The sum of my paycheques alone would see me out of debt, but - I have to be patient. The stress is humming in my ears.

***

Last week, after my big day of chores, work - OK, then off to the Dosed Party, which is fine, only I'm a little annoyed about the state of my finances, and having been up all day and working am less about the party and more about making an appearance. 

The party is fine, but I've no appetite for going hard.

***

News; one missing person found dead, another person gone missing, it's fall in the Kootenays. In the paper a despised customer is doing a reading at the library, she's written a book, all about the power of horsies to cure intergenerational trauma, her "Author's" photo shows her supercilious half-smile, she's rude and entitled and - when possible I let others serve her. But she's an "Author" and published, so - clearly a little more efficient than I.

Work has gone from dead-slow to busy, checking my phone every day in the hopes I'll get paid, apparently tomorrow but I've heard this so many times before...

Yesterday, the municipal election and all the candidates are promising the same things, reading up on all of them and I can't make a decision, If I could have attended their debates I might have a better idea, but I didn't get a chance to, and so - being familiar with the issues, and the candidates all taking a similar stance, I abstain from voting. I'm not in this educated enough to make an informed decision.

And the upstairs neighbour, back together with her man, and in the wee hours I can hear her upstairs stumbling around drunk, dropping thing, heavy footsteps, in the morning there's the vacuum as she cleans up from the night before...

***

Other neighbour, coming over to install coinbase and crypto wallets on my phone, she's convinced hers has been hacked, it takes me hours to set up an account, scans of my drivers license, this after work, or on my days off, hours of no-conversation, of watching her fuck with her phone, with mine, finally getting her crypto deposited only to lose it all in a matter of minutes...

Meanwhile she's making herself pasta, leaving me the dishes, and when I go to make my potstickers she woofs them down as well, the potsticker, in the pan, on the stove, I'm turned to do something else when the pan slides off the stove, crashes to the floor, potstickers, water, oil, everywhere, and I'm pissed and wasn't I just complaining about the extinction of Poltergeists and yet here it appears I have one of my own...

***

Then there's the Alberta Separatist referendum, refer-a-friend-dumb, Alberta, the dip shit version of our country, when they're done I say the rest of the country should have a vote to expel them; let them live a few years with their leaders and folly, charge them all passage to leave that god-forsaken province, charge visas to visit the rest of the country, and when they change their mind charge them all $100, 000 each to reenter the country...

***

Yesterday, a garage sale, a tonne of art supplies only I'm broke at the moment, and probably I don't need more art supplies and while it's hard to pass on a bargain it's pretty easy when your wallet is empty. Tonight when it wraps up I'll visit again, see if there's a free pile to raid, although when I was there things were vanishing quick...

Don't Look Back...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Ideas & Questions

Published: 18 October 2026

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This, inspired by the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice, or Lot's Wife, an analysis of the "Don't Look Back!" motif in folktales, legends and mythology.

I didn't write this, merely asked Claude AI to give me a summing up. It did well:

“Don’t Look Back” in Myth, Legend, and Folklore

In folklore studies this is often indexed as a taboo motif (Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index files “looking back” as a taboo under the C300s). It almost always appears at a threshold: leaving a doomed city, the underworld, or the otherworld.

The Tales

1. Lot’s Wife (Hebrew Bible, Genesis 19)

Angels tell Lot’s family to flee Sodom and not look back. Lot’s wife does and is turned into a pillar of salt. Jesus later invokes her in Luke 17:32 (“Remember Lot’s wife”) and says in Luke 9:62 that no one who looks back after setting a hand to the plow is fit for the kingdom.

2. Orpheus and Eurydice (Greek)

Orpheus charms Hades into releasing his dead wife on the condition that he not look back until they reach the surface. At the last moment he turns, and she vanishes back into the underworld forever.

3. Izanagi and Izanami (Japanese, Kojiki and Nihon Shoki)

Izanagi follows his dead wife Izanami into Yomi, the land of the dead. She asks him not to look at her, but he does and sees her decaying body. He flees, pursued by her furies, and seals the passage with a boulder. This is a close cousin of the motif: the taboo is “don’t look at the dead,” and the result is permanent separation of life and death.

4. Native American “Orpheus” Tales (Cherokee, Yuma, Ojibwe, Tahltan, and others)

A widower journeys to the land of the dead to retrieve his wife and is allowed to bring her back if he obeys a taboo (often not touching her, not looking, or not speaking until a set time). He breaks it, and she is lost. Scholars have long debated whether these are independent parallels or influenced by European tellings.

5. Oisín and Tír na nÓg (Irish)

Oisín returns from the Otherworld, where he has lived for what felt like three years but was three hundred, with a warning never to touch the ground. He falls from his horse, instantly ages, and loses his youth. This is a variant: the taboo is on touching the mortal world rather than looking back.

6. Forbidden-Gaze Relatives

These aren’t “looking back” strictly, but they share the logic that looking at the wrong thing at the wrong time destroys a bond:

• Cupid and Psyche (Roman): Psyche must not look at her husband’s face.
• The Crane Wife (Japanese): the husband must not look into the weaving room.
• Bluebeard (European): the wife must not open one door.
• Melusine (French): the husband must not see her on Saturdays.

7. Folk Beliefs and Customs

Many cultures advise not looking back when leaving a graveyard or funeral, when walking away from a ritual that has sent off spirits, or when someone calls your name at night on a lonely road. The assumption is that looking back invites the dead or spirits to follow you.

What It Means: Symbolic Interpretations

Attachment to the past. The most common reading is that clinging to what’s behind you prevents transformation. Lot’s wife is the classic image of nostalgia that petrifies: she literally becomes fixed in place, unable to move forward.

Obedience versus doubt. Orpheus turns because he doubts: he can’t hear Eurydice’s footsteps and fears he’s been tricked. The test is trust, in the gods, in the process, in a future you can’t yet see. Looking back is the demand for proof, and faith traditions often treat that demand as the failure itself.

Death is final. Many of these stories are about the boundary between the living and the dead being non-negotiable. The backward glance is the mourner’s refusal to accept loss, and the story enforces acceptance. They can be read as mythic models of grief: you may visit the dead in imagination, but you can’t bring them back.

Liminality and ritual. Thresholds are dangerous in ritual thinking, and the traveler must stay focused until fully through. Looking back means you are still “half in” the old state, so the transition fails, which is why the same logic shows up in funeral customs.

The destructive gaze. Some interpreters, notably the writer Maurice Blanchot reading Orpheus, see the glance as the moment when desire to possess or fully see the beloved destroys it. For Blanchot, Orpheus’s look is also the artist’s: the song can only exist by risking and losing its object. Orpheus achieves the art, not the woman.

Compassion or curiosity as transgression. Rabbinic commentary offers a more sympathetic view: Lot’s wife may have looked back out of concern for the family she was leaving behind. The tale then becomes a harsh meditation on the cost of leaving, where even a natural human impulse is treated as fatal.

Psychological reading. Jungians and others read it as the tension between ego and the unconscious: you can descend and retrieve something, but you must return to ordinary consciousness without turning back for confirmation, or the retrieved content dissolves.

Common Thread

In nearly every version, the thing you leave behind is something you shouldn’t or can’t keep: a destroyed world, a dead lover, a past self. Looking back is the moment of attachment, and the story punishes it. Different traditions disagree on whether that’s a lesson in faith, a model of grief, or a tragedy about the limits of human love.

Only Lovers Left Alive - Jim Jarmusch

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Film

Published: 18 October 2026

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A melancholy tale of ennui of immortality, a couple of sensitive vampires - Tilda Swinton (Eve), Tom Hiddleston (Adam) - reunite in Detroit after centuries of being apart, then events transpire that require their relocation back to Tangiers where they meet up once again with Christopher Marlowe (played by William Hurt) - himself a vampire that somehow faked his own death and lived into the present...

Moody, atmospheric, stylish, and while I enjoyed this, this - like most Vampire films, would appeal more to gothic and disaffected adolescents. Jarmusch has a certain inimitable style, and - rather than quick pacing relies on slow, beautiful shots to establish our sympathies.

I appreciated this, but didn't need to see it particularly...