Readers Block

For the last couple of days I have been hobbling around my house, in agony, using a pitching wedge as a crutch as I attempt to get from one room to another. I’m not sure exactly what happened but I have had a sore ankle for the last five days. Actually that should read ankles as the pain miraculously jumped from one ankle to the other.

I’ve been to the doctor (again with the aid of my golf club) and he’s suggested further tests once we get the pain under control. I have a theory on the cause of the problem but that is based on diagnosis by Google so I’ll wait till the experts confirm my suspicions.

Boredom truly is a killer. Sitting around watching daytime TV is doing my head in. I know I’ve written before about turning the telly off and reading a book or doing something constructive instead but there are two problems with that.

Today is the first day that the pain hasn’t been such a distraction that I can actually sit and write something. Concentrating on reading would have been an exercise in futility. Secondly ever since I began my efforts and writing my own novel (some days it’s a masterpiece, others its awful and a waste of time and effort,) I’ve found it really hard to finish any piece of fiction that is more than a few pages long.

I don’t know what it is exactly; I just can’t keep going till the end. I read the first couple of chapters and then I just stop. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them as such; it’s more that it is physically impossible for me to open that book. In the last twelve months I have started novels by Stewart Lee, T.S. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy and Graham Greene among others and have yet to finish one.

The latest is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, one of my favourite authors. Up to page the 196 the characters are intriguing and although a plot has yet to reveal itself I want to know what happens to them. The book itself was a gift from a loved one and has a lovely personal inscription which makes me determined to finish it.

The thing is I’ve been stuck on that page for the last three weeks. There is at least another 500 to go. Every time I pick it up I start texting or I fall asleep or I think about something I want to write myself or…I continue to make excuses for a lack of self discipline. When I was younger, before fancy digital TV and android phones a few days in my sick bed usually meant catching up on reading.

So for the next few hours, I’m switching off my phone and my laptop and I’m going to read Owen Meany and I won’t switch them back on until I’ve read at least the next fifty pages. Take that technology.

Unfortunately I’ve left it upstairs beside my bed so it might take a while before I can even get started. Now where is that golf club?

Generation

When an eight year old boy uses the word ‘cool’ in the context of creating a new superhero, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to establish what exactly he means. According to the Oxford English Dictionary cool has few possible definitions. It’s unlikely Little Timmy means restrained or relaxed pertaining to Jazz (especially modern Jazz.)

So I figured it had to be either of a fairly low temperature or fashionably attractive or impressive. But without having the etymological tome to hand it was kind of hard for me to get one of these explanations across clearly.

The explanation with regards to heat was easy enough to get across; the other left me at a bit of a loss for words. How do you explain ‘cool’ so that it is clear you mean 'of personality'. I wracked my memory banks trying to come up with something that epitomised the hip laidback variant of the word. I came up with the Fonz.

Yes, when trying to define ‘cool ‘I went to the fall back of 1970’s sitcom Happy Days, Arthur Fonzarelli. While I didn’t have the leather jacket and the slick backed hair I did go so far as to stick my thumbs up and go ‘AAayyy.’ Of course to a group of eight and nine year olds I may as well have been talking Portuguese.

They had obviously never heard of the Henry Winkler character that was last relevant in 1982. Even back then he was never really cool. He was only made to look cool because he hung around with people like Richie Cunningham.

I wish I could say this was the first time that one of my pop culture analogies had gone over the heads of the young people I work with in Fighting Words. They would so miss the humour in this blog.

One young boy wanted a synonym for antennae on an insect. He didn’t like 'feelers' as an alternative so I suggested ‘zogabons.’ He thought I was making it up. He had never heard of Zig and Zag. An older girl told me “I was so retro,” because I had a book about Dawson’s Creek in my hand. It was “so 90’s.”

I guess it happens to us all. When we realise we aren’t as ‘cool’ as we used to be. That rock/pop music isn’t supposed to be for us anymore. Despite our efforts to still buy Q and NME magazine, there is the realisation that we have all said at least once “it’s not as good as it was in my day.”

I don’t want to be one of those people who talk about ‘kids of today’ and how ‘in my day’ but I just don’t get kids of today. In my day Beverly Hills 90210 was about Brandon and Brenda Walsh and the Karate Kid was played by Ralph Macchio...Hillary Swank at a push.

That said I’m ok with getting older. Being young was never that great anyway and I reckon I’ll look good with grey hair. I just go with the mid 30’s punches and if I ever get in a situation where I’m a little lost I just ask one question. WWFD? What would Fonzie do?