storyteller

I talked to myself as as a kid. And to my dog. And to my imaginary friends. (The Lost in Space crew at first, and then I branched out to making people up.)

I still do, talk to myself -- and make people up -- and I narrate my life in my head and out loud.


When I listen to music it's not just music but a soundtrack. For My Life: The Movie.

I talk to myself at the store. People used to stare at me less when I had a baby in the trolley. 


I don't dream. Or if I do I forget, because I don't sleep much (because it's Attack of the Killer Stories at my house) and a side effect of not sleeping is loss of memory, short term and some long. But anything that happened an hour ago is often gone and so are the dreams. And usually I'm staring blindly into the dark when I wake up--in the middle of the night, like as not and I'm utterly pitch blind without my glasses--wondering if a ghost appeared just for me but I'm missing it because I can't see. I often wake with a creeped out feeling. Which I eradicate by telling myself a story.

I also tell myself bedtime stories when I go to sleep. Sometimes I want to remember them because they have something to do with what I'm writing and sometimes I don't care if I forget, which I usually do.

And when I'm at the gym or the mall or the grocery store, I'm looking around for places to hide when the bad guys chase a hero onto the scene. I think a good place to hide at the Safeway would be in the fruits and veggies because it's fun to watch them explode when they get strafed with bullets, but don't let yourself get cornered! Actually a more effective place to hide is the butcher shop, where there are all those knives.

At least die with a weapon in your hand, silly goose.

And people ask me all the time how do I make up those stories and I just say I have to write them down in a feeble effort to STOP making up stories. But it never works.  And I can't stop cuz the stories make me constipated and I get crabby like that. So it works for the constipation and crabbiness, but it doesn't work for stopping the stories.

There's a widely accepted definition of insane that says you're crazy if you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And so I, like most writers, am insane.

Or I'm just a storyteller, I guess.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A lot fewer people think I'm insane now after the invention of the cell phone. I was thinking of investing in one of those earpiece thingies and just not bothering to connect it to anything. Everyone will think I'm having some extremely important conversation.

Hmmm, maybe I'm overthinking this.

ssas said...

Yeah, at some point we have to quit worrying what "they" think.

It's the voices in my head that demand more attention anyway.