journal features

spent a week in St. Catharines

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

St. Catharines, 1998.02.20

I pulled the plug on my job of all of eight months and went to visit with my grandparents in St. Catharines for a week. I definitely needed the time away. I found myself thrust into a management role for the first time but lacking the support to make that actually work. And then it became clear that the business model is a build-and-flip with little value being added, and little in the way of upside for me visible in the future. And the icing on the cake is that I'm supporting a boss with little education, ability, focus, or drive. When I visited my father in Calgary last year he described me as "completely exhausted" and that hasn't gone away.

Note from 2021.12.31: Your grandfather would be dead before the end of the 20th Century. He warned me, to my confusion, that there would be no inheritance for me. I guess he figured I was hanging around sensing that he was dying and trying to make an impression. I never understood that man or any of the men in my family and I guess I never will.

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot