In this age of the memoir, we seem to be eager and quick to concoct a number scandalous secrets which, instead of embarrassing us like they would other people, we plan to exploit for cash. We will expose our own secrets, and then use them to set up a straw nobleman to make us look brave and stoic. How could I handle such horrors? Or be such a horror? Here’s how…and our full disclosure is all the justification we need. We are exonerated. James Fry can now write a memoir about how he completely made up his memoir, but he told the truth and it was brave.
Would my memoirs be better if I had more than just a divorce in my childhood? If I had some real, tangible, debilitating hardship in life, like abject poverty, Spina Bifida, Catholicism, or cheerleading? I don’t think so. My memoirs are for the rest of us: Normal, middle-class folk, mostly white, reasonably coordinated, daringly funny (for the suburbs), and employed, with enough disposable income to not only buy stuff, but to be able to shop regularly at Target rather than at America’s Fissured Anus (Wal-Mart).
My poetry, however, could use a third nipple. Something hearty, substantial, easily seen through a shirt, with an areola bigger than a man should have. One that makes me continually self-conscious, and aware. One that makes removing my shirt, even in private, intensely awkward and rare. What dance could I then put down with words? How looming, and weighty, would be my inner life…so much to bear that I could not bear it, save that my heart would splatter though pen onto parchment? Would you even confuse my prose with my poetry because the flow and rhythms and syncopated timing would all work in you to steal your breath?
I believe so. Even an outie belly-button would help. Or shoulder hair.
Chapter 5 of my memoirs is probably going to be a running list of inappropriate jokes I have made in public. Like when I wished a happy Black Friday to the black girl behind the counter at Chick-fil-A. Or when I released my bowels in the dentist’s chair and tried to act like I died under the nitrous. Or a little later when I called the cops from the lobby and told them my dentist gives me nitrous without an appointment.
Pop quiz: What will be the first European country to take a stand against the Moslem onslaught?
Hints: It’s not England, even after its capital has been popularly renamed Londonistan…nor is it The Netherlands, whose voices cracked and palms clammed after Moslem threats that followed a few innocuous Dutch cartoons…nor is it Paris or Germany, whose birth rates are so low that they would completely die out if it weren’t for the Moslems who have moved into town and taken over by propagating like Black Forest bunnies.
Nope…Switzerland. Militarily-neutral, notoriously-silent Switzerland. Nice work, Europe.
If you are a Christian, and you believe in the resurrection of the dead when the Messiah returns, what will happen to organ donations? Will kidneys rip out of guts, or feet tear from legs, or eyes pluck from orbits, and return to their original owners?
And what about re-gifting? Can I re-gift an organ donation?
I drove home yesterday eight hours from DC. Not sure when, or how, it happened, but inexplicably along the way Delilah got even worse at radio and Tesh got better. With these oddities, along with the thunderheads that rolled in, I thought the Apocalypse was upon us and I was actually getting left behind with those two. But it was just a storm. And in divine mercy it knocked out the radio for awhile.
It turns out that the first only-half-white president in the history of the U.S. can’t seem to accomplish anything in office. While we are told that B.O. still enjoys amazing popularity both at home and abroad, he can’t influence even low-key elections on either side of the Mason-Dixon, shut down a Caribbean dog-pen, or convince the IOC to send the Olympic Games to a gigantic city that already has in place a portion of the infrastructure needed to host them. All of this continues to goad our racist grandfathers to look forward to the “end of this cute little experiment.”
What gives? Doesn’t being half-white count for anything anymore? Maybe we should have elected the candidate who is half-female. Surely she(ish) could have bribed someone (again) to bring the worldwide display of sports-no-one-really-plays to Little Rock…
Hey this could really kickstart your career, but it’s sort of risky. Hasn’t been tried, but that’s most of the appeal…total originality. Why don’t you write a novel about a vampire? OH! Wait…better yet, a YOUNG ADULT novel about a vampire!
This will be epic! Minds will be blown! Especially young minds!
You strike me as the sort of person who would choose to just not do anything, and ride it out until wallpaper comes back into style.
When will the person you want to be kick the person you are in the face and out the door?
Chapter 4 of my memoirs deals with my several reality-TV show ideas. I was so excited about it I started talking too much. She put her palms together and her index fingers to her lips. She tried to be encouraging and said, “Ok. Dear? A reality-TV show idea is not enough for a memoir.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Memoirs are about things that actually happened,” she said. “Your thoughts and dreams don’t make a memoir. They didn’t happen.” She wanted me to get up for now and mow the lawn and water the plants on the porch.
“Oh they happened,” I said. “I thought it. The thought happened. I even told people about it. They’re out there, those ideas, and people remember them.” “But nothing happened,” She replied. “You just imagined it happening. That’s not a memoir!” She was right, the lawn really did need mowing.
“Look,” I said, with my palms together and my index fingers mocking hers, “when I came up with the idea to give homeless people credit card readers and consolidate their soliciting city-wide, and titled it Homeless Where The Heart Is, that happened. When I conceptualized Preachin’ For the Choir, a mega-church plant competition where upstart young pastors compete for a pulpit by completing various tasks like preaching, passive-aggressive evangelism by talking loudly on a cell phone in a Barnes & Noble cafe, or a marathon 48-hour Keep-The-Victory patrol at a local Christian summer camp where the pastoral candidate has to search the woods for fornicating teens, THAT HAPPENED!” I took a breath. With the same force but much less volume I closed my case with “And when I came up with the idea of putting a group of hot young twenty and thirty-somethings on a deserted island to compete in a free-for-all for food by completing obstacles and various puzzles, yes, that also happened.” She rolled her eyes. “No. Don’t do that,” I said. “I told you. I met Mark Burnett on a plane, and I talked too much. I’m sorry. If you would just forgive me and move on, we can live our lives. We can live our lives.” She grabbed her keys and headed for the door. “What about my inmate dating service called I’m In This For Life? Or the gay version–Tetherballs? Those DEFINITELY happened!”
She started laughing. “TETHERBALLS!?” She was right. Tetherballs is horrible. Do they even allow tetherball courts in prisons? Maybe Doing the Time of My Life will work. Or, Ineligible Bachelor.
“Your life is like a blankspot,” she told me. She was laying on our guest bed, stomach down. Her mouth was open, as if giving up. “It just travels to and fro between crap and wrinkles.”
I am getting older, sure, and my face is drooping a little. And I have, I will admit, wandered around and through, trying to find my career niche. Waiting for the universe to give me the great American story, and the great American contact to exploit and pester to get it published in a neighborhood watch newsletter. I certainly can’t blame it all on Al Qaeda, but now she was just getting mean. “Blankspot” is her word for the perineum.
“Whose blankspot?” I asked. “Yours,” she said.
“Well you know what? Your life is like my beard dandruff. It just sits there, underneath, acting like all is fine, but just waiting to rain down as soon as the least little thing bumps it. Then it’s everywhere and coating EVERYTHING. That’s you!”
She looked at me, squinting. Thirty seconds later she asked, “Your fungus is back? Where is your ointment?” It was long gone. I dropped it and it bounced off the sink and into the toilet with the cap off during my last application, and there was no way I was going to fish it. My blankspot spits in there.
I told her I am now pursuing a career writing epitaphs, but that only prompted her to suggest I start with my own.
Matthew James
16 August 1974–present
He lived the perfect epitaph
