Notes on the Outine for the Creation of a Memoir

So I’ve sat down here at this lovely writer’s table (made of fine milkwood slats from IKEA) to begin composing my memoir. I think it’s very important to call it such, as it really gives a French sensibility to the whole idea — “autobiography” is a garish word, one that I associate with many other “auto” words, including eroticism.  Actually, in that light, it’s very important that before I go into the details of my quixotic 23.3 years of life, I first outline some things that will not be touched upon in my memoir.  So let me tell you right now, I’m not a pervert. A weird sexual fetish would indeed increase my eccentric caché, but at what cost to my roguish yet boy-next-door demeanor? Perhaps just the wink of a intercoital tick, nothing too tragic or unredeeming. Fecundity is key.

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Sorry, I had to stop for a moment in order to fill my stem-less wine glass with a nice Cabernet. That’s right, I’m deftly swishing it around in my left hand right now. I hope later that my hours toiling over this manuscript will be gauged by the reddish-brown rings left by the wine on the corrugated cardboard slats parallel to where I rest my computer.  But right now, the wine is twirling like a tiny eddy in my glass. Speaking of moving against the current, my memoir will also be a counter-cultural view of the political and social age. For one, I’ll be sure to voice my simultaneous amusement and condemnation of things. God, I loathe myself…isn’t that funny?

I’m working intensely right now on developing an obsessive, self-destructive habit (non-sexual of course), and also looking to get into an abusive relationship. I haven’t decided whether it would be better to find a fragile and loving woman in order to slowly and irrevocably crush her soul while she continues to pledge her loyalty, Maryann Carver-style, or whether we would have an intriguing role-reversal scenario in which she threatens castration and dogs my work in more of a Zelda kind of way. Either way, that woman isn’t getting any of the royalties from my books. And my physical estate (including the desk and wine glass) will be donated to some sort of obscure German museum with an Übermensch curator. Note: inserting the word “Übermensch” is perhaps the easiest and best way to exhibit your erudition and confuse people at the same time.

Now that I’ve got a few glasses in me and feel a kind of Hemingway-at-a-French-cafe repose (which incidentally doubles as the perfect gray-scale back-cover photo pose), I would like to really reflect on things, kind of to add that extra philosophical node to my body of work. If a man is truly judged by what he didn’t do as much if not more so than by what he’s done, perhaps not writing a memoir is the best idea yet. Or maybe a memoir with blank pages? Because heck, I can’t remember everything as it happened. And that’s the god-honest truth.