Sign posted at the Petrocan station this morning:
"If today was a fish, I'd throw it back."
I love petroleum outlet poetry.
I wore beige today. I own exactly two beige items of clothing and I put both of them on, to celebrate the weekly return to work. Have you seen the movie, Groundhog Day? Mondays are like that for me. I wake up Monday, and it is the same Monday as last week and last year and ten years ago - the radio is blatting news or cheerful banter, I haven't had enough sleep - and I definately don't want to go to work. Then I come to grips, for the nine thousandth time, with the fact that I have to anyway because I am not independently wealthy and need to pay for luxuries like food and rent. I smoke cigarettes and drink very strong coffee, bracing myself against the thought of spending nearly an hour to travel seven miles on the number twenty bus. Then I shower, get dressed and pack the suitcase-size bags I compulsively carry everywhere with me.
I arrive at work my habitual ten minutes late, greet my coworkers - whom I sincerely like - and get on with doing my job. My job consists of accomplishing tasks that will not matter when I'm dead. Most of them will not matter in five minutes. But they pay me for this, so I do it.
Once, when I was young and very naive, I told a therapist, "I just want to do something that matters." And he told me this:
He had a patient with a brain tumor. This particular kind of tumor had been fatal to people for many years - uncorrectable, inoperable - but at the time, a doctor in Montreal had pioneered a surgical technique which could finally remove this tumor successfully. So my therapist called this doctor to refer his patient. "Do you know what he said?," my therapist asked - and of course, I didn't. "He said, 'Not another one.'"
So the moral of the story might be - don't mess with a Scorpio therapist if you don't want the truth.
Or the moral might be - some fish you just throw back.
