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"These essays are poignant, funny and intellectually charged."
-- Traci Foust, Nowhere Near Normal |
This new trade paperback book features many of the essays from 4 popular Kindle ebooks by David Boyne. Available now on Amazon
"Beautifully crafted, poignant, and humorous. Essays by David Boyne capture the magic in daily life, if we stop and pay attention. He reminds us that happiness, indeed, is not an accident." -- Paula Margulies, Coyote Heart
"Like Dave Barry and David Sedaris, David Boyne analyzes life's minor truths and comes up with the uncomfortable questions that may not topple governments, but do make life richer." --Ken Callaway, Screenwriter
"These stories take you on a sardonic ride as curvy as it is bodacious. Sardonic, curvy, bodacious. Yeah, that's what I said." --Julie Ann Weinstein, Flashes From the Other World
"These essays brim with profound insight. They are tales of ordinary life, extraordinarily observed. And they're funny. So funny you hardly know he's making you think 'til you catch yourself doing it." --Patty Kadel, Cartoonist (PattyKadel.com) |
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David Boyne has failed at everything he has tried.
He once considered becoming a better person. Until told that identity theft was illegal. When not boldly staring into Space or scheming for Total World Domination he exposes himself in public at DavidBoyne.com |
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A Boatload of Bissel Upright Steam Cleaners
This essay will appear in the Kindle book You Must Be Present to Win,
new essays from David Boyne available on Amazon.com in Spring 2012.
©2011 David Boyne
I just had an adventure in the global economy, courtesy of the Invisible Hand.
It began when I drove my laptop to my bank. Checking my checking account, I chanced to see a pending withdrawal that I had not initiated. An invisible hand was removing $493.00 from my bank account!
I leaped into action, figuratively, grabbing my phone without even getting out of my chair.
I called my bank’s toll-free 24-hour Customer Service phone number.
(As anyone older than eleven knows, customer service phone numbers have nothing to do with serving customers. They are part of a complex defense-mechanism which corporations deploy to make their customers serve themselves.)
I spent ten minutes of my life wandering the labyrinth of my bank’s voice mail system, shouting “Yes!” and “No!” and “Repeat Menu!” to the computerized sentry until I turned a corner and found a human being willing to speak with me. I knew she was a human being and not a computer-generated recording because she stumbled on the words of her scripted greeting. Her Indian-British-accent was entrancing. But I did not believe her name was truly Brittany.
I said, “Brittany, there’s a pending payment on my account which I did not initiate or authorize. It’s to PayPal.”
Brittany said, “I see.”
“We need to stop that payment.”
There was a long pause. Apparently Brittany was searching her script for a line of dialogue to advance the plot because she finally said, “I will now briefly put the caller on hold.”
I was then subjected to five minutes of sonic waterboarding. My bank drowned me in Muzak® covers of 1970s disco trying to make me run away and leave them alone with my money. Failing to break me, a new Indian-British-accented voice came on the line and said, “I am David. How may I be of help to you?”
“My name is David, too,” I said.
“I see.”
“There’s a pending payment showing on my account. To PayPal.”
“I can see there is a pending charge to your account,” David said. “It is to PayPal.”
“I haven’t purchased anything from PayPal.”
“There is a pending charge on your account. It is to PayPal.”
Was there a delayed echo on my cell phone?
“Can you tell me what that charge is for?”
“$493.”
Was I having a conversation with Bartleby the Scrivener? Had I become an unwilling actor in a performance of Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First?
I took a slow breath. “David, I have not purchased anything from Pay Pal. My credit card information has obviously been stolen. What is this charge for?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s on third base.”
“I am sorry?”
“Probably on the bench,“ I sighed. I took another slow breath. “David, there’s a code on the transaction.”
“I see.”
“Can you tell me what that code means?”
“No.”
While on the phone with David from India, I drove my laptop to Google in Southern California, and I googled the code: PMELANSO1. (Yes, I know I should not drive when on the phone, but this was an emergency. I was trying to prevent a crime.)
“I just googled that code, David. It’s linked to some Korean sandal company on eBay.”
“You purchased footwear.”
“No. I did not purchase footwear. And I definitely did not buy $493 worth of sandals from some Korean company on eBay. This is a theft, David. Somebody is using my debit card information. We need to stop this transaction from being approved.”
“After the transaction is settled you may choose to file a dispute.”
“Why don’t you just void the transaction before they take my money?”
David stayed on script. “After the transaction is settled you may choose to file a dispute.”
“So, David, you’re telling me that you’re going to give my money to these thieves, even though I’ve caught them before the payment has been made? And after you give them my money, all I can do is complain about it?”
“You may call PayPal. You are their customer.”
“I’m not their customer. I don’t even have a PayPal account!”
“I see.”
I closed my phone on David from India. I pulled my laptop over to the side of the cyber highway. I then tried to practice what Eckart Tollé, Thich Nhat Hahn, and my golden retriever have worked so hard to teach me—to let go of negativity, let go of resistance, and embrace what is.
I attempted this feat by taking long and slow breaths while chanting a pacifying mantra, “Sons of bitches mother fuckers!”
I then drove my laptop to PayPal, at some undisclosed location. I had to fight off repeated attempts by the robotic sentries to strong-arm me into registering and opening an account. Remaining calm and focused, I worked to undermine this corporate Maginot Line and reach the subterranean 24-hour customer service phone number. It cost five minutes of my life, but I found the number, called it, and spent the next seven minutes of my life reverse-engineering PayPal’s voice mail defenses.
Then I discovered the Fraud Department. (Yes, PayPal has an entire department devoted to Fraud. Whether perpetrating it or preventing it I do not pretend to know.) By this time I was too weary to be shocked when the human being on the other end of the phone said, “My name is David.”
But this David spoke clear, clipped, militarized American English. I pictured him in khakis, a headset on his bristling crew cut, staring into giant flashing monitors all around him, somewhere in a bunker in a mountain in Wyoming.
“The transaction is bogus,” David pronounced.
I was impressed. “Can you tell me what the $493 they stole from me was for?”
“A Bissell Upright Steam Cleaner. Quantity one.”
“They stole my card to buy a vacuum cleaner?”
“It’s not about the vacuum cleaner,” David in the bunker in the mountain in Wyoming said. “They were after the dollars.”
“Dollars? How do they turn a vacuum cleaner into money?”
David mourned my ignorance with a moment of silence. He then said, “It’s complicated.”
“But they stole my money!”
“The funds will be returned to the targeted account in five-to-seven business days. I suggest you contact your bank and initiate card replacement.”
I closed my phone. I parked my laptop. I limped into my kitchen. I stood before my imported from China refrigerator and opened the freezer door. I took out the bottle of vodka imported from Sweden and poured it into a tumbler imported from Ireland.
In my office the next day I told a colleague, Ramon, about my adventure in the global economy courtesy of the Invisible Hand.
“The thing that amazes me,” I said, “Is how some underpaid barista in a café, or a waiter in a restaurant, or some clerk in a bookstore right here in San Diego must have stolen my debit card information. And somehow somebody on the other side of the world in some way uses eBay and PayPal to take the dollars from my checking account and put them in their pocket.”
Ramon said, “Yeah. I know. I lost my wallet in Vegas last year. They used it to buy all sorts of shit.”
“Like what?”
“Rented a car. A gym membership. And some Bissell thing.”
I caught my breath. I released it. I asked Ramon, “How much was the Bissell thing?”
“I think it was like five-hundred bucks or something.”
Ramon must have interpreted my dumb shock as concern for his loss because he said, “But I got it all back. Didn’t actually cost me anything.”
As I floated away, returning to my made in Sweden desk and chair to earn my living, Ramon called out, “What’s a Bissell?”
But I was already absorbed in watching a mental movie, complete with a stunning helicopter shot swooping down on a line of freighter ships crossing the sun drenched Pacific Ocean, following a well-trafficked course leading to a certain sandal making company in South Korea.
The convoy of ships was filled with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Bissell Upright Carpet Steam Cleaners.
Buy a Kindle Now! (Or just check them out.)
It’s obvious that San Diego writer David Boyne has been in some kind of accident, clonked over the head with a dose of hard reality and is now living in the streets of Astoria—or maybe a semi-nice walk-up in Queens—as the muse of Russell David Harper and Chip Kidd. To be clear: Boyne has hit the mark with Happy Accidents. In this first of a four book collection covering objective—sometimes delicate—subjects as step-parenting and America’s obsession with consumerism (see what I mean about the Russ Harper part?) Boyne takes the reader to that scary, gorgeous, hopeful/less place called What The Hell Were You Thinking? It’s where he lives. From the sincere writing and down-to-earth tone it’s clear he’s been a resident for some time and knows his way around without a map, thank you. (Actually, Google shows this area to be somewhere in the vicinity of Flushing and Sinji’s Yoga Studio in West Hollywood.)
In a similar narrative voice as Bob Powers who waved goodbye to American manners in Happy Cruelty Day and the harmonious blend of Tom Robbins in Wild Ducks Flying Backward, Boyne takes the reader through his no holds barred style of nothing is obvious—but everything is there. In the essay Hurry Up and Wait, Boyne opens by asking a set of seemingly unrelated questions : Why we suffer, why we tell stories, why we wait— then lays bare all the examples of what the reader will experience should they choose to come along for this imaginative ride (as if we have a choice after such titles like Black Teeth and Bubonic Plague.)
…
I confess I also liked watching the voluptuous dyed-blonde barista because the tight black tank top she wore was all used up in covering the wave of her breasts, with no material left to keep from public display, the wide expanse of her rounded belly and the ski-slope curve of the small of her back and the top of the swell of her ample hips—and how all the taut, tan skin in view was adorned with a colorful, dense, complex tapestry of tattoos.
This goes further than just the irony of the complex being the simple. See Also: If it walks like a duck… These essays are poignant, funny and intellectually charged. Threaded with the susceptible civic tightrope of where we are walking today, it’s clear Mr. Boyne needs to take a trip to Washington and begin a set of new documents for the likes of those who would thrive in a Lorne Michaelesque democracy—written for the smart people, by the smart people.
If you’re looking for an In Persuasion Nation complexity of authentic humor, look no further—a pretty little calendar narrative with Dave Matthews up-thumbing each carefully plotted ending?
This isn’t that.
This is real writing, really good writing, often showing Boyne at his best when he steps back just enough from the make-nice platform giving his reader room to tie themselves to their own tracks, yet all the while you get this feeling he is standing right behind you, his lyrical prose threatening a nudge, maybe even a push ..not with both hands lest a complete fall shove you into the obvious, maybe just a finger or two, just enough to make sure you’ve been moved.
Buy a Kindle Now! (Or just check them out.)
You want the Truth®?
Can you handle it?
Of course you can. Perhaps you’ve even gone looking for it now and then. You might have shelves full of books on Finding Happiness or Communing with God, or you’ve sat in painful positions in cold, silent rooms for a solid week to get a mere glimpse of Truth®. Only to return to your once-in-a-lifetime Life to resume flipping off the driver who cut in front of you, ignoring your spouse. The usual.
Who knew? You didn’t need to do any of those things. All you need to do is read, instead, this delightful, deceptively simple and subversively profound collection of essays.
Truth® will be revealed. You will laugh. You will See and, afterward, be more likely to make the most of your once-in-a-lifetime Life. At the very least, you’ll have learned the critical life-art of driving a sofa (Feng Shui This, Bub!).
If it’s just a quirky, fun read you seek, never mind the whole Truth® thing, you’ll find that here, too. Guaranteed.
These brilliant stories, or essays if you insist on calling them that, go off on tangents. They will grab you and insist that you come along for explorations of everything from the terrors of kindergarten (The First Circle of Hell) to the bitter-sweetness of parenting (For My Collection) to the shocking discovery of the purpose of Life (Quo Vadis, Dude?).
And if that were not enough, David Boyne also presents practical advice on mastering the essential art of recalling one's dreams (Row, Row, Row Your Boat) dealing with shark attacks (Who's In Charge Here?) and deciding what to retrieve, or to leave behind, in one’s Past (Sailing Alone Around the World).
The stories in this way off-the-beaten-path travelogue take you through a beautiful, spongy, delightful mass of gray matter. They are wry, tender, and carry just a hint of the acerbic. They intoxicate.
Now that I think of it, this book should come with a Warning Label:
Reading these stories may cause outbursts of laughter and inappropriate questioning. Being under their influence may impair your ability to take things seriously and to realize that objects in mirrors are way closer than they appear.
It happened to me. It could happen to you.
Buy a Kindle Now! (Or just check them out.)
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