Yesterday, when I was at school
I quickly learned the golden rule
Don’t show your cards, don’t be a fool
Just be cool, be cool, be cool.
It worked OK with friends I’d make
The pretty girls to bed I’d take
But lying there my heart would ache
It was not cool to be a fake.
So now that I am old and grey
They care not what I have to say
I’ve had my turn, I’ve done my day
The cool ones wish I’d go away.
I am sitting in the lounge at the airport of a major US city. The lounge is owned by Air France but they share it with KLM. The staff is comprised of eight or nine sweet little Japanese ladies. Soon they will call me to a red and white motorbird bound for the land of Oz. If I had needed a reminder of the cultural diversity of the planet then I need it no more.
But it is not quite Day 3. But by the time I get home it will be Day 4. So I am getting ahead of myself rather than getting behind myself.
I am sticking with ‘authors who have changed my life’ but this time, instead of dead American guys I am going with a very much alive Australian …..
“Or about how when you’re a child, to stop you from following the crowd you’re assaulted with the line “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” but when you’re an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, “Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren’t you?”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
Thanks again Bag Lady
The rules : 53 words precisely including the word ‘fountain’
They stood there staring into the fountain. Unwilling, now, to see reflections in each other’s eyes.
“Why?” he asked.
She bent down and took a pebble from the path and tossed it into the water. The tiny rock seemed to pause for just a moment on the surface before plummeting to the bottom.
It is day two of this challenge and I choose to continue with the theme of ‘writers who have changed my life’. The list, I warn you, could run into the hundreds if I was to continue past day three. I won’t.
J.P. Donleavey died only last year and left behind many wonderful works, the most famous (infamous?) of them being ‘The Ginger Man’. It is, to be sure, not everyone’s cup of tea in that it focuses on the irresponsible hedonistic rogue, Sebastian Dangerfield who has physically beaten his wife, has abandoned her and their child to poverty and indulged in a life of cheating, lying and drunken debauchery. Dangerfield is one of the most monstrously appalling protagonists of literature and yet one is mysteriously attracted not only to him but to the sad poetry that inhabits the novel.
So. I thank you again, Bag Lady for allowing me this moment of self-indulgence.
Here, then, is a little taste of ‘The Ginger Man’
“The sun of Sunday morning up out of the sleepless sea from black Liverpool. Sitting on the rocks over the water with a jug of coffee. Down there along the harbour pier, trippers in bright colours. Sails moving out to sea. Young couples climbing the Balscaddoon Road to the top of Kilrock to search out grass and lie between the furze. A cold green sea breaking whitely along the granite coast. A day on which all things are born, like uncovered stars.”
― J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
And lest I be accused of not playing the game and not supplying a quote that is traditionally short and snappy then here is another.
“Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.”
― J.P. Donleavy
