Your reading task #12

This one is from the memoirs of a famous person who died recently.

"I was born on August 19, 1969, a Tuesday, the son of John Bennett Perry, late of the Serendipity Singers, and Suzanne Marie Langford, former Miss Canadian University Snow Queen. There was a huge storm the night I arrived (of course there was); everyone was playing Monopoly waiting for me to show up (of course they were). I hit the planet about a month after the Moon landing, and one day after Woodstock ended — so, somewhere between the cosmic perfection of the heavenly orbs, and all that shit down at Yasgur’s Farm, I became life, interrupting someone’s chance to build hotels on Boardwalk.

I came out screaming, and I didn’t stop screaming. For weeks. I was a colicky kid — my stomach was a problem from the very start. My parents were being driven crazy by the amount I was crying. Crazy? Concerned, so they hauled me off to a doctor. This is 1969, a prehistoric time compared to now. That said, I don’t know how advanced civilization has to be to understand that giving phenobarbital to a baby who just entered his second month of breathing God’s air is, at best, an interesting approach to pediatric medicine. But it wasn’t that rare in the 1960s to slip the parents of a colicky child a major barbiturate. Some older doctors swore by it — and by it, I mean, “prescribing a major barbiturate for a child that’s barely born who won’t stop crying.”

I want to be very clear on this point. I do NOT blame my parents for this. Your child is crying all the time, clearly something is wrong, the doctor prescribes a drug, he’s not the only doctor who thinks it’s a good idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time.

There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty - one - year - old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major addictive barbiturate.

I was noisy and needy, and it was answered with a pill. (Hmm, that sounds like my fucking twenties.)

I’m told I took phenobarbital during the second month of my life, between the ages of thirty and sixty days. This is an important time in a baby’s development, especially when it comes to sleeping. (Fifty years later I still don’t sleep well.)"

From Mathew Perry's Memoir

1. What are your first thoughts now after reading this?
2. Were you able to understand everything or just something?
3. What do you want to do after reading this? Do you have any instinctive reactions coming out?
4. What are some words that stuck out the most to you in the text?

Kakav je ovaj tekst u odnosu na ostale do sada? Previše, drugačiji, realniji...? Sa kojim tekstom do sada si uspeo(la) da se najviše povežeš? Piši mi, baš želim da te čujem.

Do sutra :)

xoxo