My favorite kind of reading is history, even historical fiction as long as it’s strongly based on real events. I love knowing about how things work, what people have lived through, what the human race has accomplished, and so on. Not that my story is literature worth perusing, but it is therapeutic for the author, and I’ll take what I can get. In other words, I have read more than a few memoirs, and each time I think…how does that person remember that? It was thirty-five years ago and the very dialogue that took place back then is written verbatim?! It is very distracting while reading because those thoughts can’t hold themselves back from surfacing over and over, which gets in the way of some potentially juicy stuff. Needless to say, I will not attempt to recapture perfect conversations or recall what I was thinking in given instances if I truly don’t remember. I can tell you what I think about them now, but what weight that holds is irrelevant. The bottom line, and I’m very much a lover of the bottom line, is that I won’t share with the reader my version of my own fiction because I may end up on some cable show with people providing evidence contrary to my claims and I’ll wind up having to take back everything I said. No disclaimers, just satisfactory truth that I hold here and now. Someday, I’ll forget bits and pieces until this is all a blur, so thankfully I’ll have this around to remind me of everything I’d hoped to someday forget.
I’m by no means a fascinating person. On the contrary, I’m quite ordinary because I have no passions, no specialties, no mastery of anything. I realized only a few years ago, to my utter disappointment about my life, that I am a jack of all trades, but a master of nothing. That really flat-lined what was remaining of my so-called ego. I’ve been told all my life how smart I am, but I don’t have enough smarts to push me over the edge and make me newsworthy, or even fifteen-minutes worthy, just the ordinary ability to go above and beyond the average person on menial things. Whoopy-doo. I can eke out art, sort my way through difficult levels of math, write almost brilliant pieces, have enough strategic thought processing skills to save my rear, but nothing notable enough to have anyone say, “Wow, you should see how she does what she does so well, it’s like watching a genius at work.” OK—I’ve never sat and fantasized about that--at the same time, knowing that’s not ever an option makes my upper lip curl and my brows raise to yet another acknowledgment of “meh.” That’s me—meh. (You have to say it with a slight shrug of the shoulders too, don’t cheat yourself.)
In order for my brain to sustain any sense of order, I must tell my story, or stories, by theme. Maybe you prefer me to start “I was born in a small town in a hospital just up the road from where I live today.” Trust me, you don’t want me to start that way because it won’t end with “and here I am now.” Nope. It’ll only become dust on a shelf and yellowing paper or some kind of fragmented piece of memory in my laptop. Please, allow me to tell it the way that it wants to come out naturally, and we will all be winners in this adventure. One more thing—I can’t guarantee it won’t embarrass you or make you read with your head turned completely away with your eyes straining to read the words. My life, while no Slumdog Millionaire in the making, was also no life and times of a Girl Scout.
