.Shameless.
Part of me recoils.
What are you?
Shameless?
Milking sympathy.
No, I say, I’m not.
Though I’m doing something
just as shameless,
using the disease as grist
to the mill.
Isn’t that what writers do?
I am ferocious for new material,
for keeping the old war horse fed.
Should one take advantage of an illness
or submit meekly to it.?
*pic courtesy of Wiki Commons
Can’t keep Bono in the car for too much longer.
It’s a warm day, getting warmer.
I can’t let Bono get overheated, not on my watch.
He was good enough to come with me,
make himself available.
It’s my fault.
I should have gone to the library AFTER
I had done my grocery shopping
but I was excited. The book had just come in.
What if someone nicked it?
After all, the book is in high demand.
53 requests for it when I put my name down
and only 5 copies.
Bono would have been proud.
And I want to get home quickly and start getting into it,
before the heat starts curling the pages,
and Bono starts sweating.
I’ve seen him live, the sweat oozing out of him.
It’s a bloat of a book at 563 pages.
I hope he’s good at prose writing as he is
in writing songs.
But first there’s these veggies to get.
Hang on, Bono. Won’t keep you waiting long
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Reading about Roz Chast’s parents in her cartoon memoir
‘Can’t We Talk about Something Pleasant?’ makes me feel
Almost normal. I do know how to use the toaster,
I can change a light bulb, open cereal packets neatly
so it doesn’t look ‘as if a raccoon had tried to get into them’
AND I was comfortable using the new stove after only
six months. Compared to them I’m a genius.
Meeting the Parents
But I do ‘walk around with my feelers out’ like her old man
and ‘get distracted by interesting words thereby missing
the larger point of what was being said’. And I am a fast eater
like her mum. ‘Stop gobbling your food’, I was told as a kid,
[and am still told from time to time].
I’m only on page 30 of this 230 page memoir but I’m enjoying
meeting the parents. It’s like meeting me in a book.
What’s the first word you’re going to forget? The first word that’s going to slip through the sieve in your brain?
The name of your partner, child, grandson?
With me it was an item of food.
A breakfast food we eat once a week on Wednesday. I knew it began with ‘c’ and that it was a French-sounding word like ‘croutons’ but it wasn’t that.
I could have asked my partner but I didn’t want to embarrass myself.
I did not want to acknowledge that ‘the forgetting’ had begun.
Then after a week it came to me in a flash, like the click of a thumb. I wrote it down on a pad with a marker pen just in case but I needn’t have bothered.
Now I enjoy my croissants that little bit more.
John Malone 