Never Finished: "Truck" by Michael Perry

Never Finished: Truck: a lover story by Michael Perry, 2006, 9780060571177.

Perry is an incredibly good public speaker. He is always very relaxed and very funny. This book tracks about 1.5 years of his life planning and working his garden, fixing his old International Harvester pick-up that has been sitting in his driveway a few years, and dating a gal with a daughter.

I just couldn't move past all the gardening information. The cooking tales, the International Harvester tales, the nursing school tales, the childhood tales, and all the other stuff was good. But, I could not give a rat's ass about gardening and did not want to go through any more. It was torture. That and the guy is sometimes too flowery in his writing for my taste. Damn poets.

Perry is a great observer and talks about things that usually pass me unnoticed.

A great story. In 1986 Bono was such an influence on Perry that Perry scavenged :

Eau Claire County's lone mall for boots like the ones [Bono] wore in the Pride (In the Name of Love) video. The closest match I could make was a floppy ankled pair from an all-women's shoe store. I take a ladies' size 10, as it turns out. I tucked my parachute pants in and wore the boots with an air of meaty goofball angst. It has only recently occurred to me that technically, wearing those boots counts as cross-dressing. Mistakes were made.