We reminded me of dystopias, obviously, and I searched for a used This Perfect Day online. It arrived yesterday. It and We and Anthem all have in common that the protagonist can't handle the idea of his woman touched by another. I wonder if Asher's name is in The Giver is because of Ashi here. Probably not, but it's such an uncommon name I've wondered how Lowry thought of it. I didn't like We, and this is Ira Levin cheesy and derivative of We, but it was a lot more fun to read. Maybe because it had a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment, when Papa Jan shows Chip the factory.
Years ago, somehow, my mother-in-law and I discovered that we are the only other people we've ever known to have read the book. I called her yesterday when it arrove and she was excited. She has never read Boys from Brazil either, another book I excacvated from my mother's attic in January, so I have to get to the post office to ship them both off in time for her vacation.
I'm sick! Sick! Besides that I say that anyway, because of a movie or "Bloom County" (The Onion recently ran an article about someone whose pop culture references stopped in 1988 but I go all the way to 1994), it's more fitting to say now because I'm reading This Perfect Day, in which nonassimilated members of the society are "sick." And I didn't think of this in previous readings, but that's a nod to Erewhon, in which criminality is sick but illness is criminal. Hence you say someone's "got the socks" (i.e. stolen a pair of socks) as a euphemism for having a cold. Hence Blake's "getting the flaps."
Anyway.
Where would I be without that word?
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring (again! I should have planted a tree this spring, but in the window of time when you do that, before it heats up, not that it's done that yet either praise be, we didn't know what the water situation was going to be. Ironic, innit?)--
I'm sick! Sick! This morning it was pouring so I drove because I am made of sugar and will melt, thank you Kymm. NPR or CPR was fundraising so I switched to KBCO and then to one of the "classic" rock stations. A song was just beginning. A song I knew really well. "Wow!" I thought. "I haven't heard 'I Will Follow' in years!" Because I hadn't. And still haven't, because the song was, in fact, "Two Hearts Beat As One." I haven't listened to U2 much since 1992, well after Bono's Christ/Elvis complex began to bother me, and I only just bought War digitally. And then I plugged in my iPod, that being its point, and listened to the album from the beginning. "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Seconds," "New Year's Day," and then I was at work. At my desk, I skipped "Like a Song..." because I decided, with 20 years' remove, that the song sucked. Then "Drowning Man." Then I skipped "Refugee" because I didn't like it even then, and "Red Light" too. But "Surrender"! That was my anthem! My angsty teenage anthem, baby!
But that's not even the sickness, OMFB. No no no no no. Listening, I wondered if I could find setlists from the Unforgettable Fire tour on that newfangled thing they've got nowadays called "the web." I looked. I knew it wasn't tenth grade, because in tenth grade my first concert was Duran Duran, and then I broke my arm. It was eleventh grade, spring, and I bought a $15 ticket from a schoolmate for $20 and considered myself hard done by. Here I found two dates for Hartford Civic Center, 20 and 23 April. I considered, for half a second, which of the two I had attended. And then I remembered. It had to be the 23rd, the birthday of my high school crush.
Of course I also remember the phone number of my childhood best friend, even though I haven't dialed it since about 1980. That's just how my mind works. I remember in kindergarten when Miss Pancera (who got married the next summer, and I have never been able to remember her married name, even though I saw her occasionally throughout my entire elementary school tenure, because that is also how my mind works) asked my phone number, I gave HPV's, because that's the one I knew.
And maybe I'm not that sick. 23 April sticks out as a date not because it was the crush's birthday but because on 23 April 1985 I saw U2 but on 23 April 1984 I was having surgery on my broken arm. I for damn sure remembered that contrast. (Remembering that I noticed the coincidence of dates doesn't strike me as being as sick as remembering an obsolete birthday.)
But I am still fairly pathe. The exclamation "You're sick! Sick!" is what Milo yells at Opus after Opus ran up thousands of dollars at 1-900-DIAL-aMOM. I reread my Bloom County anthologies far too many times. And it's a pity that the past tense of "reread" is indistinguishable in print from the present tense. Because that is past tense, OMFB. Just not past enough.
By the way, the set list was
11 O'clock tick tock
I will follow
Two hearts beat as one
Seconds
MLK
The unforgettable fire
Wire
Sunday bloody sunday
The cry
The electric co.
A sort of homecoming
Bad
October
New Year's Day
Pride (In the name of love)
Knocking On Heaven's Door
Gloria
40
But can that be right? I remember Bono singing some lines from "Ruby Tuesday," a song I didn't know. I probably had to ask someone at school what that was, or I didn't ask because that would have been uncool but remembered and wrote down the lines. Maybe they didn't do the whole song.