Imprinting on total strangers.
When last we entered my study to see what the Technomantically Prescient Bookshelves.... OF DOOOOM!!!! would manifest to me as "need to re-read, right now" offerings, I wanted a memoir, but my shelves outvoted me.
This time, they cooperated. They pushed out Craig Ferguson's AMERICAN ON PURPOSE, and it was the absolutely right thing to re-read.
From the New York Times book review:
If “American on Purpose” is, in part, a memoir about Ferguson’s alcoholism and his triumph over it, it is also an account of an addiction he’s unlikely to kick: his obsession with America. He first got hooked as a child, when NASA responded to his letter expressing interest in becoming the first Scottish astronaut by sending him a lavish book and two posters about space; he became intoxicated again when, thanks to the budget airline flights of Sir Freddie Laker, he visited New York as a teenager. His current success in the United States has only borne out his impossibly high opinion of the place. To Ferguson, America is a land of boundless opportunity where even a guy with a thick Scottish brogue, a self-destructive past and a “creepy laugh” can tuck the nation into bed every weeknight and become rich and famous doing it.
I'd either make a very good stalker or a very bad stalker. I don't usually become attached to celebrities. But I find all too much resonance in the life-anecdotes of "craigyferg" [as he's known on Twitter] with elements of my own past.... my love affair with space travel and astronomy, my passion and homesickness for New York City, and the object lessons of a certain period of my life in the Eighties when I literally lived in bars.
Like me, he also had parents who reminded him of movie stars... in his case, he viewed his parents as Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor at their best and brightest zenith. Mine were parallels to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz at their best and brightest zenith.
This is my third re-read of AMERICAN ON PURPOSE. My bookshelves seem to be trying to tell me:
* I need to revisit some of my regrets, but not to wallow in them.
* I need to live up to some of my dreams.
* I need to appreciate groundwork that was laid for me by those who've gone before.
Message received, dear bookshelves.
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This is my entry for therealljidol, Season 9, Week 7 - No True Scotsman.