To Say Nothing A Diary of Memory

VOLUME 3. No soy tan vaga ahora, y yo vago menos. "I'm not so vague now, and I wander less." It is now 1989, and sh** got real in the nineties, didn't it? Plenty to gossip and complain about, yo! Noamsayin? It was the end of communism, and the beginning of the New World Order, the New Robber Barons, and the New Wild West. In VOLUME 3 of TO SAY NOTHING: A DIARY OF MEMORY, it's Act Three for our hero-our anti-hero, our a-hero. Attempting to salvage a weak first degree combined with a complete lack of ambition and receding gums, he toddles west again to the University of Victoria to do another one. Who knows? This one might work. And then, snatched by luck and grace from the jaws of starvation, or a job at 7-Eleven, he finds himself cubicle-ized for the next eleven years in the British Columbia provincial government, a proposition fifty-fifty at best. There are benefits, however, to this tepid, clammy incarceration-the slow drip of material comfort. And when the accumulation is adequate, the money buys pearls of great price-a new spouse, a new house, and appealing travel. What woman doesn't like a man with a job? The hero meets the woman of his daydreams, marries her eventually, and soon regrets it. There is less overall vagabonding, but there are short, intense exceptions. The trails of British Columbia and the swells of the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii and California. And Africa! Twenty thousand kilometres across Africa in a truck and a van, sleeping in a tent. And there's more sexy stuff than ever.