Resolution

New Year’s Day
These are my New Year resolutions
1. I will revise for my ‘O’ levels at least two hours a night.
2. I will stop using my mother’s Buff-Puff to clean the bath.
3. I will buy a suede brush for my coat.
4. I will stop thinking erotic thoughts during school hours.
5. I will oil my bike once a week.
6. I will try to like Bert Baxter again.
7. I will pay my library fines (88 pence) and rejoin the library.
8. I will get my mother and father together again.
9. I will cancel the Beano.

Adrian Mole
Diary entry
January 1, 1983

Ah yes, the former method. I place another diary entry, decidedly foreign in place and time, as preface for my own blog entry. A tangential reference? An indulgence? A device of concealment? Whatever it is, it seems to me like I abstained from this tool for years. It feels like I was away for a long while – studies, skirmishes, whatnot, that haughty business of life – then I return home, dazed, feeling old, wiser and wiser by the day. Until months later when come the inexhaustible, unexhausted wisdom: I am not any wiser. I know it. The I-know-it-in-the-gut type of know-it. Still, I rummage through my room, make a pretense of clean-up, and ignore books already read, expanded lists of disciplines, the more recent weapons. These things don’t tell me anything new. They sing to me, every day in every way it’s getting better and better, which, like all of the greater truths, will eventually unfold into a lovely lie. More and more gets known, I hear, in lullaby rhythms. But it’s new year, it’s morning. Instinctively, I reach above the closet. I find the dusty shoebox. An old toy, a grand comfort, a fathering joy. I play – not as I used to, but as I would – and wholly I recall an allergy to dust.