Balls of Rice

Author: Nic Olson

  • Fingerless in Mexico

    It was as if he knew that my finger turned blue and swollen like I had shut it in the car door, or hit it with an errant swing of a hammer. Maybe when I was waiting in line, he noticed me staring at it, trying to push back the cuticle and wincing. Maybe he could see the subtle glaring blue from his padded teller chair. Or maybe he could smell the gangrene. Either way, he asked me if I wanted travel insurance. For the low price of $200 I can insure that I lose $200 and nothing else. Double dismemberment, and so on. When he heard the word ‘Mexico’ he salivated kindly, knowing that any wise traveller to Mexico buys travel insurance, because it is a 50/50 chance that you will survive while visiting Mexico. I said I was interested, but declined all the same. RBC can suck the ‘hard earned’ dollars from someone else’s bank account. I’d rather be doubly dismembered.

    But if I lose a finger while traveling, because it was falling off before I started traveling, maybe they’ll give me that $50,000 lottery that he was waving in my face. This could be a worthy investment. I’d cut my finger off for $50,000. I’m sure there is a market for that in Mexico.

    He used Superman analogies in Quebecois English and I imagined my finger swelling to the point that it looked like a small, soft eggplant, pulsing with electric charge. They’ve got cheap medicare in Mexico, I tell myself. And likely black market medicare in Bloomington, Indiana. His greedy sense of worry and my mother’s concerned messages seem to foreshadow a point where I look back in regret that I didn’t buy overpriced insurance for suckers while I mourn a missing limb or digit. Jean-Francois just wants what is best for me, and my mother just wants a son with full use of his extremities. Fair enough, but no thanks.

  • Canadian Malt 2


  • Canadian Malt 1


  • Blithering Idiot

    That is a super-peachy-keen post. Thanks for really blathering on like that! Seriously, I don’t think I could have spent more effort wishing for something heavy to fall on me to erase that nonsense from my mind.
    -Blithering Idiot

    I am a blithering idiot.

    The sooner we can say this to ourselves, the better. But in order for it to make the impact that it should, we must call ourselves idiots before someone else does. The repetition of the phrase merely because someone else realized it first, means much less. I knew I was a blithering idiot far before this person, presumably a man, commented on my blog. Whenever a person indirectly calls you an idiot, and names himself an idiot, that means you are doubly idiotic. Just makes sense.

    One of my greatest worries is that this entity that is Balls of Rice is simply a forum for stupidity. Spouting opinion and acting pompous. Opinion is never wrong, nor is it ever right. But nevertheless, I don’t want to be filling your digital ears with my digital voice of digital opinion. Social networks fill anyone’s quota for opinion, and I strive for this URL to be as far away from daily updates and profile photos as possible. #blitheringidiot

    Opinion is never truth. In a search for truth, opinion is an unnecessary distraction. In a post by post search for truth, it is difficult for the five-hundred-and-sixty-second post not to be dripping in personal belief, as if actual decent topics had dried up and Balls of Rice had no choice but to immerse the sponge in a bucket of opinion.

    So while watching hockey that has no soul, I sit in dead heat with phrases bouncing in my head like the digital time on a computer screensaver, such as ‘The washing machine is loud.’ ‘Your roommate showers for too long.’ ‘I smell like old ravioli.’ ‘I’m tired.’ ‘It’s hot out.’ ‘I hate Burrows.’ The only thing keeping me a blithering idiot and not a goddamn idiot is the fact that at times I don’t say these things I think. And that I know well what I am.

    We are all idiots. Blithering ones. And all for our own reasons. We are smarter if we find it out ourselves, instead of letting another blithering idiot tell us.

  • Assurance in Laughter

    The laughter of humans enrages me.

    At least certain humans. The forced laughter, which I myself feign too often, is a pitiable thing. Emotionless, needy, facetious; not to mention it rings in the ear like the smash of glass on floor. So I find myself, four weeks into unemployment (and counting), sitting outside in the prairie-mimicking wind, trying to hold down the pages of my borrowed hardcover book, spine digging into the brick, tailbone making its groove in the fibreglass balcony, just to avoid fake laughter.

    I would rather a person pretended in any other action of emotion: crying, climaxing, tooth-grinding, yawning. Even a smile, under the same circumstances, lacks the obnoxious nature of laughter. One can laugh falsely to benefit someone putting themselves on the line with a sour joke, or to make themselves more comfortable in an awkward situation, or for attracting attention to themselves for their own benefit; the latter should be avoided more than the former, although all forms are cancerous.

    I have long held the belief that people only laugh when there is someone to hear it. Tree in the forest logic, I guess. Or, ‘I need to be acknowledged while enjoying my sitcom’ syndrome. Or something awkward and shallow. Subconsciously, no doubt, but when watching a movie alone, with others in the vicinity, audible laughter is often an attempt at grabbing attention. Laughter infiltrated by insecurity. I, on occasion, have laughed audibly while sitting alone in my bedroom, but this has occurred only in response to scenes such as this, and is muffled by my realization that only the scared laugh out loud while alone.

    There is no such thing as too much laughter, and I believe that all, even funeral home employees, would agree, and I am not yet a bitter and old enough man to be stealing the laughter from the scores of good-hearted people in the world. But when I hit the age of at least thirty, old and grey, expect a man ready to slay the joy and laughter of the masses. Can’t wait.

    I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at the first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.

    -Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, Chapter 3, p45

  • -George Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p188

  • The Apocalypse Series (Three)



  • The Apocalypse Series (Two)




  • The Apocalypse Series (One)




  • Hail the Cobbler, Hail the Shoe

    One shoe on, one shoe off.

    I have been in the process of shoe repair for the past few weeks. New shoes in April, $50 for a pair of The People’s Shoes. The week after receiving them in the mail, I walked my soul into them. A month afterwards, holes have begun to form, so I have been patching them up with pieces of peanut butter jars, sections of old longjohn material, and hot glue. I want to become a cobbler. Good as new, but made modest.

    A month or so of feeling good about myself, not just self-esteem, maybe pride or a sort of egoism. I knew it was going to come crashing down. I deserved to come crashing down. A contentedness of being can only last so long, and one must expect that they will be down-pegged hard in a short period of time. A long talk, one shoe on, one shoe off, and I was reminded of some personal aspects I needed to work on, but was comfortable in my own self-righteous glory. And it just takes one day, a few beer, and a clouded sky to remind myself that pride isn’t worth keeping around, and that yes, I am still indeed among those that I hail the worst.

    As completely inflatable human beings, deflation keeps our egos in check. Brand new shoes need to get dirtied and hole-filled so that we can cobble them back to a more humble shoe.

    The cobbler’s work is never finished.