Last I spoke to Jet, she was on my case about being a lazy narrator in my book. Apparently (and this is meant to sound facetious) if you’re going to write a book that follows the daily minutiae of a person’s life for six weeks, it’s important to share some background information about that person. As if! Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that my bravado and egotism are a facade. I hate talking about anything other than the unimportant surface details of my life. It’s easy to talk myself up in a “blog,” snob my way through conversations about music, and boast weird and unusual stories (sexual escapades or brushes with the law), but when it comes to personal information–in this case, writing about why I chose to undertake last summer’s excursion, what led to that decision, what I was hoping to uncover and what I did uncover–it’s like signing up for the World’s Strongest Man Competition when you can’t even bench press a bar without weights clamped to it.
I forced out about five pages this morning while I was at work, and I think it’s honest and informative. It needs some work, but I think it will fit well between Chapters 1 and 2. I like the idea of stepping outside of the continuous present-tense trip to look either into the past, or to alter the reader’s thought process. Reading long interviews and descriptions is tedious and hard, so including creative pieces from my trek along with transcribed out-takes from my audio tapes will change the pace of the book, and hopefully lend people some of that necessary detail about who I am and where I’m coming from. And why I’m writing this, of course.
To lighten the mood when I was finished, I went back and forth with Ilya constructing a completely fake biography for myself: “The son of a migrant worker and a herpes-ridden bag lady, I was born on a mild April evening in nineteen-diggity-three. We had to say diggity because the Kaiser stole our word for ‘eighty.’ Anyway, the first recorded ‘anal birth’ in the state of New Jersey, my first moments were to set the tone for the rest of my life: screaming, vomiting, and covered in shit. Not many people know this, but the first recorded sound in the history of man was Adam farting on a contact mic in the Garden of Eden. I was told this by Ronnie James Dio, who appeared before me on a fiery chariot in a fever dream I had at the age of seven. I was raised in an affluent, obnoxiously Jewish suburb of New Jersey; a town with more Cohen’s than a FOX executive-producers’ meeting.”
