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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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He's disappeared, Batshit I mean, 1 month of the restaurant open and no sign of him. I start to get a little concerned, make some enquiries, in Riondel I ask at the general store, it turns out he slipped, fell, maybe broke his hip, at the hospital...they cleaned out his house in Riondel, didn't want him living there anymore, wasn't safe for him...
Call the hospital, but his alias, Kootenay name, it's not good enough.
And now to the troublesome task of finding out his real name. Ask about Riondel, no one knows it. Or if they do they're not saying. And here, I should note, is a big breach in Kootenay Etiquette - you use the name people provide you and don't ask any further. Lots of people around here have good reason not to give you their real name - from the draft dodgers, growers, and people with warrants outstanding, to the plain old "it's my party name", you take everyone at their word and don't pry.
But I gotta pry if I'm gonna find him...
Ask about in Nelson, a few carefully directed queries and I have it...
Pretty ordinary, a quick Google turns up thousands of results. (later research would prove that his real name - for the purposes of the interweb, anyways, is no better than his pseudonym).
Back to the search, rumour had it he was staying at his sisters...
Didn't know he had one. But on the first call it's BINGO.
And take him for dinner and catch up...
Found him, grown old overnight, he's been moved by agencies to Nelson, all of the doctors, nurses, chipping in to get him a place, furnishing his new apartment at a home up ... street, he describes it, he's tickled pink, loving all the attention and fuss he's stirred.
But he's of a sudden grown old, his hip, not broken but a pinched nerve, he's lost 14 lbs, the hip was minor, he was another 17 days in the hospital with pneumonia, he's telling the same stories he's told a hundred times, living in town, this will be good, easier to find him, to take him out, there's shows he'd love, the burlesque, drag shows, night-clubs, town will work a lot better for sure, but I can't help but thinking this newly found comfort will be the death of him...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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He starts back tomorrow, the Winter's been hard on him, the other waiter at the Pub. Already a skinny guy, he's lost easily another 30 pounds over the winter living in his crack-trailer on the East Shore. He looks like a bobble-headed skeleton, Skeletor, he's been surviving on $150 every 2 weeks EI, the last few months, and I know what that's like, no heat, no company, sitting every day in his trailer, in the dark, the punched in walls, the filthy antechamber filled with the previous residents garbage, broken BBQ's, Old Tube TV's, he was for a while capturing mice, keeping them company, letting them go, ....
Every couple of weeks you'd take him for lunch, he needs it, buy him some cigarettes, groceries, would do more but I haven't been doing so well myself. He's grateful just to get out of the trailer. And you talk to him and the isolation, it's taken it's toll, he was never a great thinker but even the little bit of reason he had seems to have disappeared, he's fallen down the Kootenay well...
He's looking forward to getting back to work. I'm hoping he's still sane enough to hold a job...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Now a month or so before I'd shaved my head, and was in the position of needing a cheap haircut, the overall grow-in had begun to resemble a bad buzz-cut, it needed some shape.
So off to the barbers, a different one (every time!), the old school signage and location made me think that it'd be a little cheaper than the others, and, really, I didn't need much, a half inch off the sides and a cleaning of the stray hairs...
Downstairs, it's in a basement, a couple of chairs, she beckons me to sit...
I choose the wrong chair, the hairdresser quickly corrects me: "Not THAT chair, that used to be my daughters..."...
And I know now that this is going to be a long cut. Short hair, should be quick, but it isn't.
The story of the chair, she's getting more emotional as she tells it, the picture on the wall, that's her daughter, her problem, the doctor that made things worse, the eventual inadvertent OD, she's waving the scissors, getting mad, madder, the haircut, it goes, I hate this, it's all a bit too much information for a haircut, for a best friend even.
At the end I give her a hug, she's recovered somewhat, this was all too recent for her, too fresh, pay, tip, think about the last 2 Barbers I've been to, I've got to start showing them some loyalty...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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It took a while to open all the packages from Batshit I got for Xmas. There was a lot, and began to weigh upon my mind, bundles of scrolls to be deciphered, interpreted, bags of partially wrapped (and consumed) food, finally, over a couple of days I managed to open them all.
Scrolls, abundant, treasure maps, more drop-offs I was expected to deliver, mixed media, some more pornography but a surprising amount of non-pornography as well.
Boxes of unopened chocolate, licorice, regifted, as it were, from his overly abundant Xmas, half-eaten biscuits and crackers, I was too sick to listen when last I saw him but he was telling me the tale of how he has a 25 year old color printer, Canon, that does an excellent job of printing off $20.00 bills, and here he cracked his wallet open to show me all the supposed counterfeiting he had been up to, but it was bullshit, all of it, and my patience left me when the Flu started. But - just from the stuff he was regifting - you knew he was doing well. A brand new bar of soap, one of the fancy ones, and while I was pretty sure his hosts would have wanted him to use it I was also pretty sure if they got a whiff of me they'd agree I could use it as well...an abandoned work glove with provenance written upon it,
Ornamented children's books - Saint Stormy (himself) &
Litnin Rod - Me...
And - the glove used by Renee Russo for making toasted cheese sandwiches. As well as various instructions and invitations to the Royal Wedding to be passed off to various invitees...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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About 12 or 14 years ago, when I worked at the HP building in downtown Calgary - Tech Support, I had a manager. She was a big woman, maybe 400 pounds big, she was dating a thin, small bearded guy, they had met on the job a week before I started, he was already moved in. Her desk was covered in pictures of her kids, she had a few, various exes, she would start to explain but then taper off after a minute or so, it was confusing even for her. They were fucking weird. But that whole job was weird, and people that work in Tech Support - well, they're pretty fucking weird too, so all in all with all the weirdness she only stood out for a moment or two then fell into the background noise that was the idiocy of the blind and the stupid trying to lead the disinterested through the rudiments of troubleshooting and fixing their own computers.
Anyways, the company was shit, and every 6 months or so we'd find ourselves taken over by another company, new handbooks and rules, new staff, and on one of the later takeovers the manager and her lover found themselves redundant. They had a couple of weeks left to work - and so my manager, she let out her little plan. She wasn't going to do IT or tech support anymore, no, she was going to follow her passion and become a "Life Coach". She went around the cubicles of all the employees ("Team Members") and handed out her business card. It said "Life Coach" on it, and if you visited her website you were treated to daily inspirational quotes and ways that she thought that you - as a human being - could be more productive.
It was completely fucked up. I mean, really really fucked up. I mean, you'd look at this person for a minute and hire a life coach just to change the dire circumstances that had somehow landed you in a room with her, the thought of going to her to in any way try and gain life skills or motivation was preposterous.
When finally she was made redundant she'd drop 'round the call center every few weeks to check on us, she was a lousy manager but since leaving she'd decided to take us all under her wing, give us the benefit of her life skills and mentorship, and you'd look up from the desk with that "WTF" glint in your eye and you'd catch somebody else's eye that got it as well - nobody would speak it out loud, we were all very corporate, and a lot of them plain and simple didn't get how fucked up it was, they probably checked her website every day, they probably thought she had her shit together and wanted to be like her. It was that fucked up a work environment. And it makes me laugh now, 'cause out here, well, there's a big market for "Life Coaches" and they're always the same sort of people, it'd be like choosing a Schizophrenic Psychiatrist or Terminally Ill nutritionist who balanced their diet at McDonald's...