Newsgroups: alt.angst
Subject: Boxing Day 1993
From: patrick.burton@canrem.com (Patrick Burton)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <60.14501.4963.0N18F59B@canrem.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 93 22:47:00 -0400
Organization: CRS Online (Toronto, Ontario)
Lines: 70
Boxing Day.
Sitting at the computer reading mail again today, like yesterday.
The account expires in mid-January. After logging off I'll play
Tetris for hours until I'm so tired I can run away from the curse
of consciousness, probably by mid-morning. Like yesterday.
Christmas started with a phone quarrel with the best friend, the
most recent x-significant other. Stupid like all petty fights;
ended by saying "I don't want to continue this conversation,
good night" and slamming the phone down. Five after 12:00.
Woke about five pm and opened the presents. Chocolate creme
liqueur from a friend, a sweater and other clothes from the
family. Phoned them in Alberta; this year I decided not to go.
Not a good time to be with them.
In mid-February I will be forty-one years old. Still no novel, no
major publications, "no star/no fuck" as Richard Brautigan had
it (a highly positive literary reference, that one is.)
Can't forget the New Year of 1990: an A-frame ski cottage
buried under blankets of snow in the brooding crisp stillness of
the Canadian Rockies. Drinking $100.00-a-bottle Perrier Jouet,
with a woman I thought would be my wife for all our days.
She wore black silk. She was beautiful, she was smart, she was
sophisticated and experienced; a hard worker with her own
successful LA business, due to inherit several million dollars.
She was in love with me. And I was in love with her.
I haven't spoken to her since April of 1990. She gave up.
It's cold in this room. There are too many juice bottles and
newspapers not recycled on the floor, the laundry and the dishes
need my attention and they will not have it today.
Boxing Day. In a room in old Parkdale in cold Toronto. Not a
condo in LA where Emmy and Oscar and Grammy awards shine
and glitter in the warm glow of all the world's imagination.
Now: I work on computers, small cheap PCs, for a tiny
community agency helping psychiatric consumer/survivors...
crazy people who have little more than an assistance cheque,
a handful of pills, too much time, and each other.
It's a good place and the work is worth doing. It pays, and
there is freedom to try to help some troubled folks, who very
much need whatever hope they can grasp. Most days, I just
concentrate on doing the task at hand and I don't look back.
But, Boxing Day... time to put on the gloves and go a few more
rounds with the past.
"Charlie, Charlie... I coulda been a contendah..."
- Marlon Brando, On The Waterfront
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patrick.burton@canrem.com || "Ruling one's life
Parkdale Activity - Recreation Centre || by common sense
(The Other PARC) Toronto Canada M6R 1A3 || How can one fail
Opinions are my own brand of madness. || to be intense?"
PARC is crazier than I am. || - James Joyce
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