Martin Strube:
CLASS OF 1965
Beaconsfield High SchoolClass of 1965
Beaconsfield, QC
Memorial UniversityClass of 1972
St. john's, NF
Martin's Story
Well, life for me since I left school has just been one f**k up after another. Each passing year has been punctuated by the realisation of how stupid I've been over the previous year. I feel it coming on again right now. (To be honest, school itself felt like one big f**k up after another. Perhaps the pattern was set then?)
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I went to university mostly to get away from home. After 2 years I realised I had to get away from university. I took a year off and went travelling. Predictably, the year stretched into two before I could bring myself back. Just managed to complete and then went travelling again.
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One of my early self-imposed criteria for "success" was not to specialise before I was 30. Lo and behold, I succeeded so magnificently that I well and truly overshot my target such that to this day I still haven¿t a clue what I should be doing.
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As it happens, the only work I found truly fulfilling and satisfying was farm work (excluding tobacco farming - don't try that if you don't like pain). However, farm work was/is associated with such low income and even lower status (especially in England) that even I couldn¿t handle the ongoing indignity.
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For a while I deluded myself into thinking that I could make it as a writer and/or musician and squandered quite a few years in undisciplined pursuit of these goals. Occasionally I still resurgently pursue these goals - in just as undisciplined a manner - as "the rat within" continues, albeit less frequently, to gnaw. (If you're really interested, google East Coast Road Productions.)
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Happily married with fine u...Expand for more
pstanding and over-achieving children? Well, er, no. Not exactly. I couldn't even get that right. I did actually get married once, but had to give it up when she first tried to stab and then imprison me. Thank heaven there were no offspring.
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My "career" has been a litany of largely unrelated attempts at professionalism interspersed with, as I say, doomed attempts at artistry. I currently work for the City of Bristol, and if I can just stay interested long enough (and continue to overcome doomed creative impulses) I may just get a modest and probably undeserved pension.
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Fortunately - and perhaps this is my only real achievement this lifetime (let's hope I don¿t blow it) - a couple of years ago I re-met a lovely woman whom I first met on one of my artistic benders in about 1990. On that occasion, consistent with my policy of pervasive and unswerving stupidity, I let her get away. This time around, she wasn't so lucky. She has a little girl by a previous partner and the three of us seem to get on like a house on fire.
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Re BHS reunions, I went to one a while back. I have to say, it was a gas. Typically poor planning on my part meant much of the experience was "en passant", but for lovers of the surreal, it was top notch. Faces at first just ghostly, turning a whiter shade of pale. But big respeck to the people that persisted with it. But this time around, October? Jesus Christ. That's the time of year I'm most likely to shoot myself. SUMMERTIME. That's when these things should be happening. How about having a kind of travelling-circus type rendezvous in late July/early August. That's the sort of thing I could go for..
So, that's where I'm at. Where are you at?
ps: Anybody ever heard from Lesley Croucher?
mstrube at ecrp.co.uk
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