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New Landlord....
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2353
The house has sold, and is now in the hands of the new owners.
Which is the cause of some stress.
Mainly because the last owner was enormously patient with my varied rent schedule.
The new owners I don't think will be so kind.
But they've owned the house now for 2 days, and have not yet swung 'round to enquire about the rent.
That could be a good thing. Or not.
It isn't there. There are cheques outstanding, as always, but the rent, the rent and damage deposit they're probably expecting, it isn't there.
It's a warning sign that the freelancing thing isn't quite working out, and so I've made up my mind to move back into the world of paid labour.
Not an easy or light decision, but in light of the past year a long overdue one.
So, if the blog posts are a little slender, or less than your expecting, this is why. Until I've some sort of confirmed, regular employment I'll be investing my energies in other directions. But I'll resume this, hopefully in a sunnier vein, in the very near future....
The Demise of Quality
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2480
Call me old fashioned, but there it is. No one would disagree, we all remember when, yet now it's gone. Completely.
I am speaking, of course, of quality. By quality I mean thought, labour, intent, craftsmanship, design...Many of which are the intangible hallmarks of something that might endure. But endurance is not the issue. Perhaps I imagine it, but with the rise of technology it seems to have gotten worse. As if technology - cell phones, PC's, Televisions, by it's nature obsolete, has now made it more acceptable to make everything else to the same disposable standard. Picture frames, shelving, lamps, fashion and housing cheaply churned from sweatshops to be sold at exorbitant markup, then later discounted at thrift and dollar stores before making it's way to the landfill. Often the entire product lifestyle is under a year.
When things so lose their value, so often do people. The homogenized lives of factory suburbs and designer accessories is creating a new sort of person. One with the same qualities as we find in their cherished shops, disposable people who identify themselves with brands and lifestyles. There are no values. They've accepted the disposablity of technology, and so it becomes easier to accept the disposability of their car, their fridge, the furnace, the coat, their husband or child, many of which have arguably seen no tangible improvements in design or technology in 50 years. "But it's cheaper to replace it than to fix it..." is often the line, and it is, we encourage this, cheap goods made to be used X times and then thrown away....
Entire generations will grow up without the knowledge of quality. Or of only brief encounters, the ipod touch, quality, yes, but made to be replaced in a year. And this brief flirtation breeds a certain promiscuousness, a cavalier disregard for many of the principles I hold dear.
Call me old fashioned.
Weird & Lucid
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2231
Up at 5:00 AM, can't sleep, work, sunrise, then at 9:00 go for a nap.
And I have the strangest of dreams. I have to take a parcel to Edmonton for my family, my brother, and so I take a bus to Red Deer then decide I don't want to go all the way to Edmonton and post it from there.
At the bus depot downtown I hang around for a bit, watching the police round up the crazies. There's a cute black hooker, her ass hanging out of her jeans, they take her too, bundle her into the van - "She's crazy" the police tell me.
And when I get home to my dream apartment my brother is there, other people I don't know, a Korean landlord and his 2 children, they've all brought beer and are having a party. There's a childs swimming pool in the living room, some baby in a stroller and this plump girl under a giant plastic umbrella smiling at me and I think the umbrella is really her hat so I complement her on it and she moves away to show me that it's really an umbrella.
There are all sorts of people everywhere..
My brother, he's trying to show me some photos he's got of me, this envelope, he wants me to send it in to Derren Brown, some sort of user participation is required for his next trick...different pictures of me, taken "surveillance style", we talk about the last trick, the lottery prediction, we agree it wasn't the best one...
I go upstairs, carpeted, dark blue, like a normal house. And I realize that this isn't my house, I don't know these people, it's all just a dream.
And so I go back downstairs in my underwear only, they all look at me funny, I've got a dark stain in the front (I just took a pee) and I tell them I don't care, it's just a dream, and they understand.
They're still talking to me. I'm getting upset, looking for meaning, Why this apartment? Why these people? What does it mean? And my brother brings me a chart that shows everyone in the building. In one of the apartments is Celine Dion. There's other apartments too on the same floor with names like "B Dion", so we guess that Celine owns all the apartments and is using Aliases. There are other apartments, we look at the names on those, some are obscured and hidden, like they don't want to be known, others are long strings of numbers and I'm trying to decipher them., remember them because they must mean something....
****
The dream disappears, another, similar related dream which I forget....
****
And then the dream of the world's best dollar cinema. I've forgotten I'm dreaming. I've taken the kids, it's clean, there's a long counter with all sorts of snacks and refreshments and it's empty except for a couple of employees who are doing stock or something. It's empty because we're late for the film, but there's no rush. There's a secretary or bookkeeper going over a long column of numbers with the manager, and so I go and order and give them $50.00 for the food. Meanwhile I'm talking to the manager, it's the best dollar cinema in the world, he's shown up today dressed as Batman, one of those plastic ripped-ab form costumes, but then he's got unicorns and musical notes painted with sparkles on his face, and I'm telling him how it completely ruins the Batman effect, makes him look gay, he's agreeing with me, pleasant enough, there's an usher, she dressed as Snow White but she's done it well and looks fetching as Snow White should. They're both very nice, there's a reason this is the best dollar cinema in the world, but now the manager and bookkeeper have gone back to their figures and the movies started and I haven't got my popcorn, so I tell the bookkeeper and she goes - "Oh, right big spender", because I gave her a $50, and she gives me change of 2 $50.00 bills and some smaller notes. I don't tell her, it's my lucky day, It's bright in this dream, the fluorescent lights overhead, and so I interrupt her again - the bookkeeper, to inquire about my popcorn and pop, she's forgotten, and suddenly I find myself on the end of the counter, in the children's party area, it's darker here and she's still off fetching my popcorn and I'm wanting to pay again to see if I get too much change....
Autumn
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2208
Today it is Autumn. The wind is blowing, the sky a slate grey, colored leaves blowing in waves down the street.
I've enquired about my cheques, any of them would do nicely, I have the children this weekend and it would be nice if they were fed. If I was fed, it's been an entire week living on pasta with butter and rice fried in oil. But there's been no reply. And so maybe I should simply ignore my email for a day or two and see what happens.
There was the call from the conspiracy group, they were meeting up for coffee, but I couldn't go, I had, I have, other imagined appointments.
It's autumn and the leaves rustle down the streets, fill the lawn, the wind bends the trees. The appointments, they won't show, they were imagined.
And so I work on projects, pass the time "finishing things up", websites forever in development have now the possibility of completion, other things as well draw to their final close and I finish them up, work madly upon them and pause only for a cigarette and reflection.
I'm almost out of cigarettes, must ration them, the absence of reply on question of the cheque makes me think that it could be a while....
Change is in the air.
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