MAD JOURNAL

April 10, 2013.  Mad journal.  Get your mad here.  Pouring rain through morning and now it has cleared up.  Windy, cool, but not cold.  The garden here on the upper deck is in bud.  Just back from the computer store I was in Saturday because I finally remembered that this must have been the place, this parking lot, where I abutted the front end of the car up against one of these concrete curb thingys and somehow managed to tear off my front license plate without noticing.  I only noticed yesterday that the plate was missing and have spent the last three days trying to remember how and where this could have happened.  It was some place I don’t usually go, I knew that.  And then I remembered.  It was Simply Computing, a place I’ve only been to twice in the last five years.  They have their own parking behind the building and there was a spot there and I pulled in and on the downward sloping slot inched forward a bit too far, as can happen, and I thought it was just the plastic guard thing under the front bumper that had got slightly hung-up, and I put the car in reverse and backed up about a foot.  If a license plate falls in the parking lot does anybody hear?  Today the plate was nowhere to be found.  I went into the store and they didn’t have it.  No matter.  Monday we’re sending this car on a one way ticket to the Fraser River.  Enough is enough.

April 9 2013.  Rain.  A cool spring and a cool afternoon.  I get the call and go, the four to eleven.  The usual grisly slog and for what?  For the hundred bucks, youth.  It’s sad.  The security guard shows me the little jack-knife slasher he’s taken to carrying.  He tells me he’s been called as a witness for a mug facing charges downtown including for an attempted armed robbery here last summer.  The dolt’s little crime spree included pepper-spraying a gas station attendant that night before he came in here, and then some other piece of idiocy, I can’t remember precisely what, after he left here with no money.  Who are these people?  This perp was white, male, middle-aged with a medium build.  The till jockey, a she, hasn’t been back since this individual stuck a gun in her face.

April 8, 2013.  Should I contact these clowns that sent me a card nearly a year ago telling me they looked forward to reading my submission, but please be patient?  This is an issue.  Just how patient do we need to be around here and what if we’ve spent most of our lives being patient and it’s made no difference?  It’s like the people who’ve said to me:  You’re a good guy, Esteban.  And they’re right.  I am.  But what good has it done me?  I mean, look at me.  Being good has afforded me nothing.  And what, anyway, would be the motivation to be patient any longer either?  Is it not wiser to reflect on the distinct possibility that, as already experienced once with this outfit, and it is a well-known outfit, my submission, which they asked for mind you, has been booted, dumped, barbecued, shredded, misplaced, thrown away, stomped on, lost?  Nobody has a year to sit around on your pleasure, youth, whether you reside in Toronto or anywhere else.  Serious get.  So it continues daft.  I spit on the memory of my literary ambition.  “It is all a darkness”.

April 2, 2013.  Guestworker, airport.  What?  I said guestworker, airport.  The guestworker doesn’t query.  The guestworker goes where the guestworker is needed.  The guestworker goes because the guestworker needs.  The guestworker does not like being needy, but the guestworker is.

So.  Stand around in a wind tunnel ten hours.  Well, a wind tunnel, yes.  What the hell it’s an airport, isn’t it?  No planes come flying through, just buses, taxis, limos and vans.  It’s a service industry scene.  And the baggage cart wallahs wrangling long trains of baggage carts from their collection points back to the International Reception Lounge (IRL), pulling them along riding an electric-powered buggy through the so-called VIP entrance-exit.  It’s a fairly dingy wind tunnel around here, that never sees the light of day.  It’s cold and the concrete is cold, the asphalt is black and there’s a surprising number of cig butts lying around despite the no-smoking signs.  This tunnel could use a bath.  Where are the pressure-washer wallahs?  The walls are dirty and so is the floor.  Very VIP.  But the people are friendly.  There isn’t much for us to do but that doesn’t matter.  We’re here.  We’re on station.  At our posts.  And we don’t care a hoot for nothing.

April 4, 2013.  That was the week that wasn’t.  Paid handsomely for doing not very much at all and axed two days early but paid out in full.  In the aggregate, closer to what I’m truly worth, guestworking or otherwise.  My valuable time, which is all I have.  It was an interesting few days in Airport City, all told, but I’ve enjoyed better pizza.  The seating arrangements were excellent.

Author: Steven Brown

Creative View all posts by Steven Brown