Posts
To: Dom Borax
Sent: Saturday, June 30th, 1999 14:26 PM
Subject: Just for you
Dom…okay you’ve read the diplomatic global email sent to everyone now here’s the truth…
For your eyes only…
…it was a fucking nightmare…Marcus pulled this guilt trip on me as soon as I got home…
...he said, I should have left with him...
...he said he felt embarrassed that I stayed on
...he said he hated knowing I was having fun…
...he said that I probably had more fun without him being there…
I think he just has an issue with birthdays…
he hates his own…he says he feels individual attention is selfish…
it’s his so-called faux socialism coming out…
personally, I think he gets embarrassed that everyone is looking at him…giving gifts when the world is so fucked up…it’s a priorities thing…he places his priorities on aid over personal celebration…
he says he feels hypocritical eating fine food, laughing at regifted presents and drinking mid range wine when there’s such inequity of wealth in the world…
And then he gets all self defeated…he admits that it’s hard to have fun when you have a world perspective…he tries to turn it off but he can’t…it’s who he is…and at time he hates himself for it…he hates that he can never have fun…
And in these moments I get it...with both barrels…
I get the Karl Marx barrel…
And I get the Susan B Anthony barrel…
Anyway, back to last night…I came home at about three AM…
I thought he’d be asleep…but he wasn’t…he was watching...what’s it called...the late night music clip show... this is driving me crazy...I’m going to have to look it up... (man, having senior moments already)
Rage…
It’s called Rage...how could I forget... anyway they were playing a whole bunch of Prince clips on Rage…and I think he was torn between feeling angry, assaulted and sexy…
…he then turned on me…
he accused me of not caring about his beliefs…
I…as you know…was a little in my cups...so I fought back…
I said he didn’t care about my beliefs…he was dominating the tenets...it was all about him…I had a strong belief system too…and all that we talked about was his opinion…
I said it was ironic that for a man who believed in the shared wealth…there was no sharing within his own personal interactions…that he wasn’t a socialist at all…he was a middle class soft intellectual trying to find meaning in other people’s misery…and this is unforgivable…this is using a true doctrine as a deficit of true character…
AND I DON’T SUBSCRIBE TO DOCTRINES!!!
He looked at me…muted Raspberry Beret on the television…and asked if I subscribed to him…
I lost it…it was my birthday and for one moment…just in that moment…couldn’t he subscribe to me…? Other’s did…they all did…
I threw the regifted presents at him:
LOOK! I said…
I got this ugly porcelain dog…
I got this jigsaw puzzle of the twelve apostles…
I got this out-of-date bottle of Mustard Pickle from someone’s road trip…
I got this moth eaten toy gorilla that dances to the Macarena when you press its chest…
I got this little book of pithy one liners that isn’t funny…
I got this ‘Sea monkey’s on Mars’ globe from the National Geographic shop
...and I got this ‘days of the week’ set of underpants…
but what did I get from you? I got nothing…you didn’t get me anything…
He sat back in his chair at this point and grumbled that he told me he wasn’t getting me anything on my birthday…birthday’s are awkward and imposed…he told me I knew he was going to get me something the following day…I knew that, he stressed…
…he then stood and walked into his bedroom…
I thought for a second…here he goes…into bed…avoid it all…avoid me…read his book and trick himself into not feeling by feeling about the world instead…
But he didn’t…he came back out with this wrapped box…he told me it was late now…tomorrow even…and he was going to give me my present…as promised…
Okay…I didn’t see that one coming…I have to admit…I wasn’t out of my rage yet…he had muted rage on the television and he was trying to mute the rage in me…
I took a breath and opened the box…inside was a book called Pencil Letter by a Russian poet named Irina Ratushinskaya…she wrote them while in prison in 1982 for anti soviet agitation and propaganda…
Marcus had been given the book by an ex girlfriend and now he was giving it to me…
She was dead… he said
The Poet? I asked
The Girlfriend he said
Dead-dead!? I asked, stressing the second word
No, just dead in my heart, he said.
He then said…it was me, now…only me… he then opened the book and read me his favourite poem…
“The day died like a dog and won’t come back,
So let’s arrange a funeral feast
There will be many more days just as black
I know. The further east
You go, the worse it gets
(That’s the usual fate of pioneers)
Then we went to the bedroom and fucked…but I had revenge…I wasn’t in the moment with him…I was absent…I was breaking my rules again and thinking of someone else…someone from another time…and he never knew because he presumed I was faithful…but he was wrong…he was so wrong…
Happy birthday to me…
Stacey.
