Friday, October 25, 2013

The Colt 45 Chronicle #41

Some housekeeping is called for this morning. Last Sunday I failed to post a letter from a collection of letters I've been working my through since January. The letters are a record of my first two years in New York City, after I had left the University of California to come to the Big Apple with my wife in order for her to attend medical school at Columbia University.

The collection ends basically at the same time as the marriage, the point at which I leave New York City to return to the West Coast for six months. I moved to Seattle and went to work for a drywall contractor who had employed me summers' past in the Bay Area. The wife kept the personal computer on which I composed the letters I am now calling "The Colt 45 Chronicle."

After subletting an apartment on 23rd and Aloha on the eastern boundary of Capitol Hill I found an inexpensive Brother manual typewriter at a secondhand store. This manual typewriter became my primary means of communication for the next five years.

Typing on a manual is a radically different experience from working on a computer keyboard. By embracing the secondhand Brother I was, as a bachelor for the first time in my life, recalibrating my thinking.

Below is a kernel of a letter composed with a word processor on an IBM-clone computer. I started the letter and intended to go back to it but never did. Its preoccupations -- a yearning for intimacy, the horror of work, professional football -- are ever present in this chronicle. My marriage only had about a half-year left.
Autumn 1989
The loss of community. You leave school and the company of friends and the first thing you're confronted with is work and loneliness and the overwhelming sense that you're doing things -- biding your time: paying rent, washing dishes, drinking -- so you can have something to do on the way to the grave. I read this article in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED about the old Pittsburgh Steelers. Four Super Bowl rings in six years. And judging from what they said, you can tell that they really miss that feeling of community, of winning like it was their right.

No comments:

Post a Comment