Max "Bunny" Sparber

WE NOW ENTER the section of the book that Carnegie calls "Six Ways to Make People Like you," and so obviously these next few chapters will be firmly ensconced in the "How to Win Friends" territory. As we have seen from previous chapters, Carnegie firmly believes that the best way to have people respond well to you is to treat them as though they were the center of the universe, and he makes that utterly explicit here, saying "You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."

In fact, he begins the chapter by presenting his idea of the perfect friend: a dog. According to Carnegie, we can't help but fall in love with dogs, because they are so thoroughly beside themselves with pleasure when they are with us. Carnegie was a great lover of dogs, and mentions his own best friend when he was a child, a pet dog who was killed by a lightning strike when Carnegie lay by him. Now, this is not the sort of story you should mention in a sentence and then leave alone, but Carnegie goes no further. Apparently, spontaneous dog electrocutions are one-sentence tales for Carnegie.

There are two things I would like to say here. Firstly, not everybody loves dogs. I do, but some view them as unendurably neurotic creatures, and it's true. While it may be forgivable for a dog to go into near seizures of pleasure upon being tossed even a scrap of attention from a person, that sort of behavior is generally frowned on when people do it. But, of course, I don't expect that Carnegie is suggesting we should be just like dogs, but instead that we might be inspired by their boundless interest in us. I would suggest that people who don't like dogs might not even like people who are inspired by dogs, so it's not a bad idea to make sure you are not overwhelming somebody with sloppy, canine-like fascination.

Secondly, it should be noted that, throughout the book, Carnegie works under the assumption that his readers, and the people they will meet, are all pretty normal. There are no creeps in Carnegie's world, and he doesn't give you any real tools to handle them. There are just some people who need to work on themselves a lot before they go glomming on to other people, attempting to dazzle them with their panting interest. We have all, at once time or another, had this sort of experience with someone that we just don't want to get to know at all, because they seem as though they may be dangerously unbalanced.

Additionally, there are hustlers out there who take advantage of people's native good manners, and abuse them to try and get their way. These people deliberately don't respond to being politely rebuffed, because their only concern for manners is how they can be twisted to their benefit. You might have had the sort of experience where someone aggressively tries to panhandle, or flirt, or sell something, and just seems oblivious when you demur. My policy is that a hard sell gets a hard no, but Carnegie isn't going to help you with these guys.

So be it. That's the caveat of this book: It's useful in dealing with ordinary people, and pretty useless when it comes to dealing with more wretched examples of humanity.

With that in mind, Carnegie is right about developing a real interest in others -- and not just in their lives, but in the things they are interested in. There is a joke that Emo Phillips used to tell about thinking that his brain was the most fascinating organ in the human body, and then he realized who was telling him that. Well, our brains are also pretty good at convincing ourselves that we are scintillating, and, therefore, making our experiences the ones we enjoy talking about. It's human nature to want to be the center of attention; or, if not human nature, it is my nature.

I've managed to control it, for the most part, but when I was a teen I was so greedy for attention that I was jealous whenever anybody else got it, and tried to get myself into the frame, in a manner of speaking. Someone pointed this out to me when I should have been old enough to have figured it out on my own -- about the age 18 -- and I was embarrassed by both how naked my need for attention was an how obvious it was. I quickly became a lot more gracious about sharing the limelight, even if I wasn't happy about doing so.

Despite this, when you're fascinated by yourself, you tend to let yourself be the subject of conversation, and sometimes gently push the issue. I have had a terrible habit of just waiting out whatever somebody else has had to say, focusing rapt attention on whatever they were saying so that I could take advantage of any pause to turn the conversation back to me, where it belongs.

Now, I don't do this all the time, and I know it is obnoxious, so I try to be aware of it and wrestle it under control, but this is an area that requires some retraining of habits from me. I don't think I am uniquely despicable in subtly making myself the center of discussion -- no, Carnegie's whole premise is that we all crave and seek that. But he is of the opinion that if we flatter others by giving them our full attention, and do so without faking it, but because we really are interested, the benefits will be enormous.

I have a feeling he's right, but, more than that, letting other people have the spotlight is an important lesson in humility, and one I can afford to make habit. I shouldn't need to constantly reaffirm how awesome I am by seeking the attention of others. I should, instead, have enough confidence in my own awesomeness, if you will excuse the expression, not to need to waste time on it, but instead invest that time in learning about how awesome someone else is.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

BUNNY'S JETPACKING is dwarfed by Ben Bikin, the 32-foot-tall, penny farthing-riding mascot of Sparta, Wisconsin.

MORE FROM THE JET PACK TOUR!

I SHOULD MENTION that this suggestion from Dale Carnegie, alone with his previous two, is from a section entitled "Fundamental Techniques in Handling People." His first two suggestions, don't criticize and lavish praise, are sort of the bedrock of his ideas for how to get along with others, but this suggestion, "arouse in the other person an eager want," is his first real management suggestion. The first two, broadly speaking, are his overarching ideas for how to win friends, and this is the bedrock of his theories about how to influence people. To a certain extent, every other suggestion in the book is just a variation, or an extension, of these three "fundamental techniques." These are the big three; the remainder of the book is mostly just suggestions about how to implement them.

Now, personally, the "how to influence people" part of Carnegie's book is less interesting to me, at the moment, than the "how to win friends," as this is "Bunny's Charm School" and not "Bunny's Management Camp." Nonetheless, Carnegie did not separate his philosophy neatly into two distinct parts -- in his world, you can't lead people without the tools needed to make friends with them, and you can't make friends with people without influencing them.

There's a good reason not to simply breeze past this chapter, either. Were you to simply follow his first two suggestions, and make it your habit to offer compliments and withhold criticisms, you certainly would end up with people responding positively to you, but these are just as easily the tools of an engaging sociopath who is only looking for techniques to keep people placated. With this chapter, Carnegie makes a much stronger demand: it is not possible, in his philosophy, for you to arouse an eager want in somebody else without you first trying to understand them.

He quotes Henry Ford in this chapter (apparently unaware that Ford wasn't an ideal example of tolerance, having taking it upon himself to reprint antisemitic literature); nonetheless, if we can pretend it is not the man who brought the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to an American audience, Ford's words fit in with Carnegie's worldview, so much so that Carnegie is inspired to repeat it, in italics, immediately after his first quotes it: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that angle as well as from your own."

Knowing Ford, it is possible that he meant "If we could only understand the Jews' wicked schemes, we might be successful against them," but this is not how Carnegie understood his words, and not what he meant by emphasizing them. No, instead this is an extension of Carnegie's viewpoint that we should be interested in the experiences of others. Although he presents this as an effective technique for management and communication, Carnegie would also return to this suggestion with anecdotes about how trying to understand others makes it easier for us to get along with them, and to communicate with them, and to genuinely respond to their needs.

This is another chapter that could easily be a trick, and salespeople will occasionally attempt to use this approach as such, simply rephrasing their wants as yours. "Look at this new television! You want to buy it so I can treat myself to a night at the strip club with my commission, don't you!" I think this is sort of the nature of sales, and I don't think I am alone in reacting badly to it. I have always made a distinction, and perhaps an exaggerated or mistaken one, between "sales" and "customer service," in that the former tries to create in you a new want, and push products that you neither need nor desire, whereas customer service is primarily about finding out what you want, and helping you get it. I am sure there are salespeople who do exactly what I am describing as customer services, and so I may be making a false distinction, but it is nonetheless useful to me in thinking about this.

I will investigate Carnegie's ideas about management more as I get into later chapters, in which he expands on them, but his suggestions consistently struck me as being more about approaching someone else from a customer service, rather than sales, angle. Additionally, Carnegie really seems to prefer this approach because it fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation for other people.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

OBVIOUSLY, this is easily partnered with Dale Carnegie's suggestion not to criticize or complain; what are you left with but to compliment? But Carnegie is explicit that he is not referring to empty flattery, which seems to disgust him and he believes people can see through. No, he thinks everybody has something, or many things, that are honestly admirable, and we should take the time to figure out what they are and praise them.

This is another example of how Carnegie's view of people can seem a little schizophrenic -- or, more charitably, complex. After all, he spent the last chapter telling us, in essence, that most people are not mature enough to handle criticism (and this is an ongoing theme in the book), but now we get to the second chapter and Carnegie carps on about how wonderful other people are.

In fact, there is nothing contradictory about these statements at all. Carnegie doesn't, in fact, believe that you should avoid criticism altogether, and knows there are circumstances in which voicing it is necessary, and quite a bit of his last chapters are about how to do exactly that. But people do often react badly to criticism, and it often, in part, because that criticism is poorly phrased or, worse still, wrongheaded. So Carnegie spends his first few chapters adamantly insisting that people need to get out of the habit of reflexively criticizing and get into the habit of reflexively, and genuinely, complimenting.

I do some of this already, particularly with friends, but I would do well to expand the habit to do it more regularly and even offer compliments to people I do not know. Carnegie himself offers up an example of this that is unexpectedly funny, although I suspect he didn't mean it to be: He describes lavishing compliments on a postal worker for his magnificent head of hair. I suppose, in the 30s, when Carnegie was writing, men could praise each other's luxurious locks in public without fearing it might be misconstrued, but to modern ears the conversation sounds a little flirty. But, then, some men really do have exceptional tresses, and perhaps they deserve to be told, however it sounds.

Carnegie is something of an expert on Lincoln, having written a biography on him (in How to Win Friends, he retells one of my favorite stories, in which Lincoln was challenged to a duel and suggested broadswords in a pit), but this is the second chapter in which Carnegie evidences an unexpected fascination with criminals, which will pop up, here and there, throughout the book. In order to demonstrate how much people enjoy puffing themselves up, and why compliments work, he tells of the gangster John Dillinger, on the run from the law, fleeing into a farmhouse in Minnesota and calling out "I'm Dillinger! I'm not going to hurt you, but I'm Dillinger!"

Stuff like that just doesn't seem to happen often enough in Minnesota.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

I NEGLECTED to mark this one off my list when I completed it, which was, I think, on April 18. You can read more about the project on its own page, but let me say that, when I began writing, I didn't realize what an undertaking 80,000 words, or the typical length of a novel, was. In fact, I far surpassed that amount, as I threw out about a third of the stories I wrote, but it took more than a year to write 80,000 words I was happy with. This is, in part, because I completely burned myself out and had to take three or four months to recharge my creative batteries, but there were periods were I was writing a story a day, most of them ranging between 1,000 and 2,500 words.

I wonder if it is easier or harder to write a novel. A series of short stories demands a different premise every single time you sit down to write, while a novel is one premise, sustained for 300 pages. Of course, many novels contain multiple smaller stories, so, in some ways, they are often like a short story collection, except that all the stories are connected and work toward the same climax.

Well, it will be a while before I ever even think about such a thing. I am, once again, giving the old batteries a change to recharge while I revise these stories, but my next book project will again be a series of collected stories around a single theme, and then I have an idea for yet another collection of stories after that. But, man, this was one hell of an undertaking, and I am very pleased to have it completed.

Most of my 101 tasks are right now somewhere into the process, not even half-completed, and most of them are undertakings that are at least as time-consuming and labor intensive as this one, so it will be quite a while before another of the 101 things can be scratched off my list. So it's nice to have this done, if only to show myself that, while these things take a lot of time, they can be completed.

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

I HAVE SETTLED INTO A PATTERN of exercise. I will squeeze my grippers on Monday and Tuesday, give my hands a rest on Wednesday, and then squeeze again on Thursday and Friday, recuperating over the weekend. Usually, after a rest, I am able to close the trainer repeatedly, although not easily, with both hands. I cannot close the Number 1 gripper -- not even close. But every week the trainer has gotten a little easier; after all, I only managed to close it a few times when I first bought it, and then not at all for a week or so afterward.

I have started to notice changes in my hands. They haven't hardened into planks yet -- in fact, they don't seem to have hardened at all. But, when I crack my knuckles, the sound is now thunderous, like a cannon firing.

Additionally, and more significantly, my hands don't stay sore anymore. When I began doing this, they ached nonstop. Now, they usually recover from working out with the grippers relatively quickly, although if I have used the grippers one day, when I use them again the next my hands will be considerably weaker. I simply can't seem to fully exhaust my hands either. I just used the gripper, and I feel like I could go another round with them right now, a few minutes later.

I can't imagine how long it will take before the trainer become easy for me and the Number 1 starts being something I can squeeze closed. But, then, what's the hurry? As I understand it, often you will just sort of plateau for a while, showing incremental improvements, and then, one day, you find yourself going to squeeze a gripper that previously you had trouble with and find yourself shutting it a dozen times without difficulty.

THIS IS THE FIRST CHAPTER of Dale Carnegie's book, and the first to reveal that his opinions about mankind are not rose-tinted. He actually opens the books with an almost pulp-fiction retelling of the capture of a minor gangland figure, "Two Gun" Crowley, who fought off New York police in an astounding torrent of gunfire. When captured, he insisted it was all in self-defense, and that he was a harmless soul who wouldn't even trouble a fly.

As far as Carnegie is concerned, we're all a little like "Two Gun," in that, and I quote the author here, "ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don't criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be."

Furthermore, Carnegie considers criticism futile and counterproductive, because it puts the other person on the defensive and wounds their ego. His suggestion: Just don't do it.

Of course, he's not always right. There are some who demand honest criticism and thank you for it afterwards, without it affecting their self-confidence. But, then, he may be exactly right, as it might be only 1 in 100 that is like this. It may be less.

Later in the book, he provides techniques for approaching people with suggestions for change, and they all stem from the same basic idea that people are really bad at taking criticism. But for now, his suggestion is don't even try it.

Of course, I can't take his advice professionally, as I am a critic. It is quite literally my job to give an unvarnished response to a work of art, as plainly as honestly as I can. Now, it should be a bit different to criticize a work of art than it is to criticize a person, but I have found there is no practical difference. People will respond to criticisms of something they have created with the same agonized anger and bewilderment as if you had taken themselves to task, and they will glow with the same pride when you compliment their art as they would if you bathed their persons in compliments. Further, it will never occur to them that if they are to be honest with themselves, then they must accept that the criticism is probably at least as accurate as the compliments, and not accept one without the other. But that's not the way people are built, and it's not the job of a critic to concern themselves with that. Critics are not writing to build up the ego of a artist, but to provide as clear a response as possible, for the sake of readers and potential audience members. And I have learned through bitter experience that artists will respond as badly to cautiously phrased criticism as they do to criticism spoke bluntly, so I never try to be circumspect. Heck, some artists will take you to task for not complimenting them in exactly the right words.

But if I can't concern myself with Carnegie's words in my professional life, I certainly can incorporate it into my private life. The truth is, a critical mindset is very hard to get out of. Once you start looking at the world as a balance of flaws and successes, everything goes on the scale. You begin second guessing your family, and your friends, and people you meet on the street, and your boss, and your bus driver. I have mentioned before that I don't think this is unuseful, as long as you are defining your criticism as "it may be fine for them, but, were I in the same circumstance, I would prefer to do it the other way." But sometimes criticism just exists for its own sake, because you are in that mindset, and you'll be talking to someone and it will just burble out. They may agree with you about, say, a friend's flaws, in which case it starts feeling like gossip, or they may disagree with you, in which case you end up seeming like something like a jerk. Either way, it just doesn't feel right.

Now, I am already cautious about expressing my criticisms directly to others, as I, like Dale Carnegie, have experienced how badly people react to it. But, truthfully, I think I can put myself into more of a live and let live attitude in general. I do not need to cast the entire world in opposition to myself, and constantly second-guess their behavior, even privately, to see how I might differ. It's really just an exercise in self-flattery most of the time, in that I feel I might, in an imaginary world in which circumstances are reversed, make better decisions than others.

The truth is, I think getting out of this habit of being privately critical will be a bit of a relief. It takes a lot of energy, and the truth is that that is time better spent working on making my own decision and projects better.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

I WENT TO BALLS CABARET on Saturday at Midnight to read my story "Alcohol," the last piece of the revision puzzle, and, for me, one of the most illuminating. It just suddenly seemed obvious to me that the story was no longer an assemblage of punch lines, and so the first half of it, in which I bundled all my previous comical anecdotes, was overlong by a considerable margin, and was getting in the way of the part of the story that felt like it really was the story -- all news stuff, detailing my character's adventures in a juvenile boys home. The story was well-received, which was very nice, and, if Leslie Ball can find a slot for me, I shall go back next weekend and read another story. Of course, at this rate, it would take me almost a year to do all my revisions, so, down the road, I will speed up the process by throwing a few parties in which I can read a clump of my stories all at once in front of a small group. But I am still feeling my way around this revision process, and this past week has been very instructive for me, so I shall continue doing it this way for a few more weeks, until I feel really comfortable with the process.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I HAVE JUST NOW completed reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Or, more properly, I have just now completed reading it twice. Mr. Carnegie, you see offers up some very specific suggestions for how to read his book. He suggests you read it with a pen in hand and mark sentences or suggestions that seem especially meaningful to you, which I did, although usually I prefer not to mark up books. I figure, if Carnegie suggests doing so at the start of his book, and I really want to try out what he recommends in general, I might as well do as he asks right off the bat.

His other suggestion is that you read each chapter twice, once quickly, to get the gist of it, and once slowly, to drink in the details. This seemed rather excessive to me, as Carnegie's ideas are few and specific enough to be written on one notecard, which is how he initially presented them, but, again, if the author suggested reading his book in this way, I might as well do so.

I'm glad I did. I don't know that doing so really allowed me to grasp what Carnegie is saying more than my first reading, as the author makes a few simple points and then demonstrates how they work with anecdotes from history or that were contributed by his students. Instead, the rereading allowed me to grasp Carnegie's complex and contradictory understanding of humanity. Because people, to Dale Carnegie, are petty, venal creatures who must be approached gently and indirectly, like a mad stallion who might kick you to death at any moment; but people are also capable of almost anything, with the right encouragement, and are so fundamentally worthwhile that your focus should be on them, rather than yourself. Repeatedly, Carnegie insists that successful people must hold others in high esteem, and lavish them with praise and attention. And he doesn't mean this as a parlor trick that the unscrupulous can fake in order to bend people to their will; he expresses disgust for anyone who might attempt such a thing, and doesn't believe it will work. Instead, Carnegie argues that others deserve such behavior because they are worth it, and we are no better than them, and it is how we would want and deserve to be treated.

Carnegie is obviously moved by small acts of compassion, and believes they can change the world for the better. While many of the anecdotes he chooses are about businessmen using his suggestions to solve tricky business problems, a significant number of his anecdotes are about people simply being kind to each other, and the good that can result from that. One especially sweet story tells of a impoverished boy who was in the hospital for surgery on Thanksgiving night, whose mother could not afford to visit him and herself could not afford to have a proper Thanksgiving. The boy was frightened and lonely and heartbroken, and lay in bed, covered with his sheets and sobbing softly to himself. A young nurse noticed and came in to comfort the boy, and wound up staying with him long past when her shift had ended, playing games and fetching him a Thanksgiving dinner. Many of Carnegie's stories end with him saying things like "and that boy grew up to be Abraham Lincoln" or "and that small gesture ended up ending the war in Croatia," or similar, but this doesn't. Carnegie merely left it in because it was a moment of kindness that impressed him.

I understand that, as I have likewise been impressed by such things. When I was a teenager, I attended a Jewish high school in Minneapolis called Maimonides. It was a school run by Orthodox Jews with a student population that was mostly Conservative Jews, and I was the lone Reform Jew -- the liberal wing of Judaism, and one that is sometimes the subject of scorn from the other two wings. But the faculty at Maimonides were fair-minded, and asked me if I would invite my rabbi, Rabbi Pinsky, to speak about Reform Judaism. Pinsky was amenable, and came in and gave an interesting speech about how Reform Judaism draws its inspiration from the books of the Prophets, which emphasize acts of social justice.

I walked Rabbi Pinsky out of the school, which was located on the Jewish Community Center, which then, as I'm sure it is now, was filled with older people. And as we exited, we passed an old woman whose cane dropped to the floor. Pinsky quickly leaned down and recovered it, handing it back to the woman without a word, and we continued onward.

I don't know why that gesture impressed me. It was a simple one, and Pinsky did it reflexively, without thinking about it. It just struck me as kind, and chagrined me, as I wasn't sure it would have occurred to me to do the same thing; I might simply have not noticed, assuming someone can get their own cane when it falls.

I think Carnegie is right about human nature. I think people are motivated best by appeals to their vanity and respond badly when their egos are bruised. Carnegie does not think it is possible to win an argument -- which is a rather remarkable thing for him to say, as his background was in debate. He makes the case that all won arguments are Pyrrhic victories, in that people will be so annoyed to have been shown up that the damage to interpersonal relations will be greater than the victory of proving a point. Much of the book consists of tools for addressing the problem that bypass confrontation, replacing it with flattery and gentle encouragement. I don't know how I feel about this, as I have always engaged people in the belief that they are adults, and should behave like adults, and included in this is being able to take criticism. But Carnegie is more diplomatic, and probably wiser, as he is not convinced that any one side in an argument is ever fully right, and blunt antagonism is often counterproductive. Maybe I am right, and maybe adults can handle the heat of scorching criticism, but it seems to me that Carnegie is suggesting a kinder alternative, and kindness seems to me to be a worthwhile undertaking.

Carnegie's courses have been popular for the better part of a century, and have been tested in the crucible of human experience and seem to largely work, so I shall simply incorporate them into my life, see where they succeed and where they fail, and proceed from there. The book is divided into four sections (originally six), and each section contains between three and 12 specific recommendations, so, over the next few weeks, I will address each of the suggestions and consider how to integrate them into my life, and, as always, report back.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

MY SCALE has started to lie to me again. When I weighed myself on Thursday, I was 178 pounds, up two and a half pounds from the previous week. I decided to try again today and was 175, down a half pound from the previous week.

I've never watched The World's Biggest Loser, but I caught a few minutes of it one night. The scene was their regular weigh-in, during which the teams discover who, collectively, has lost more weight. Some people had lost quite a few, and pumped their fists with joy. Some had lost none, and they moaned in shame while flashbacks showed them eating sweets or drinking alcohol. One woman managed to gain a pound, and burst into disbelieving tears while the remainder of her team glared at her.

Maybe they should have weighed her two days later. Because, as I have repeatedly discovered, what the scale tells you from week to week has almost nothing to do with how much weight you are losing. I am thinner than I was a few weeks ago. I mean visibly thinner -- my stomach just keeps getting smaller and smaller. And yet, as of two days ago, the scale had me as heavier.

It can mean all sorts of things. Now that the weather has warmed up, I have started walking. A lot. I already walked about 10 miles per week. Now I am walking 10 miles per weekend, and walking home from work every day, and going on long walks around downtown Minneapolis in the evening. So it is likely that I have started to add some muscle, and muscle is heavier than fat. But also you weight can fluctuate a lot, especially if there is salt in your diet, which can cause you to retain fluids. As a result, the scale is almost useless as a weekly measure of weight-loss; it is only useful over time, measuring decreases in weight by tens of pounds, rather than individual pounds.

That being said, my weight loss has slowed. I am eating more. I don't think the Cookie and Shake diet is as effective as my last one, but it is undeniably effective, as I continue to lose weight, and without all the fuss and effort of the last diet. But I'd like to lose more, so I am going to add one more component to this diet. Most diets are about what you eat, but I want to tweak the way I eat, and the tweak is pretty simple: I won't eat until I am genuinely hungry, and then I will stop eating when I am 75 percent full. I was doing this out of necessity in the last diet, because I had so few calories I could eat during the day. Now, when I am out with friends, I will often eat, even though I am not yet hungry, just to be social. That sort of behavior can really put the brakes on weight loss. Additionally, I have started to just eat all the food I have allotted for myself, but, as I noticed in the last diet, you actually don't feel full until about 15 minutes after you stop eating, and so if you eat to the point where you feel full, you have actually overeaten. So I am going to pay attention to how full I feel, and, when I feel mostly full, I'll stop eating.

We'll see if this will speed the diet back up. I have about three weeks left of this particular diet, and I would like to make the most of it.

More Rock Star Skinny.

I HAVE A FEW THINGS GOING FOR ME. I am not unhandsome, for one thing, and, now that my weight is coming off, I'm starting to see some of the dash that I had when I was younger. I have a sense of humor, which I reflexively use as a sort of cheap trick to get people to like me, as do a lot of people who have some passing familiarity with shyness and with self-consciousness, but have discovered that if the world doesn't love a clown, it often forgives one. I am occasionally smart. I am curious. I am fun. I can be kind.

But I have a few things going against me. I can be mean, for one thing. I used to be pretty forgiving of that, in part because I tried to blunt it by passing it off as a joke, and later by saying that sometimes people deserve a little bit of meanness. But that's just not true, and meanness, even when you feel it is justified, just tosses another pebble onto the vast desert of pain that this world can sometimes be. And I am sometimes mean because sometimes I honestly don't like other people. I get along with them well enough individually, but, as a species, they seem made up of the sorts of people who will nearly hit you while running a stop sign, and then yell at you for being in their way. Despite my essential misanthropy, I sometimes get my feelings hurt quite easily and react badly, although my response is generally to pull away rather than to lash out. And, at the summit of the mountain of my misbehavior, I am critical. This is easiest for me to excuse, as I am a professional critic. Additionally, I rarely express my criticisms of my friends unless I feel they either genuinely want to or very badly need to hear it -- and that's quite rare.

And, ultimately, I feel like I am not being so much critical of others as simply demarcating how my behavior differs from theirs, and what they do that I wouldn't want to. Saying so makes me sound less judgmental: Maybe that decision is right for them; it wouldn't be for me. And perhaps such criticism is useful. But I still often end up feeling like a jerk.

In other words, I'm probably a lot like a lot of people.

But I am 40 now, and will soon be 41, and feel like a lot of my behavior consists of unconsidered habits. I know the term neurosis has fallen out of favor in psychiatric circles, but I still find it a useful way to understand the world. I suspect a lot of us are nursing little wounds, often ones we got so long ago that we scarcely remember them. But we habitually guard ourselves from getting injured in that way again, and so a lot of our behavior is made up of these mindless, reflexive, neurotic protective responses. But because they are reflex, and because they are unconscious, they may not actually be the best way to guard against repeated injury -- indeed, it's likely that we won't ever be injured in some places again, but we guard them anyway.

When I feel saddest and sickest about humanity, it helps me to remember that the world is full of people who have been hurt, and that all they are trying to do is keep from getting hurt again. Some of the worst behavior stems from that, and, while we can be critical of the behavior, we can be compassionate about the cause of the behavior. This helps me be a little more forgiving of people who bother me, and it helps me be a little more forgiving of myself.

But I have found myself at a crossroads. Here I am, in the exact center of my life, and I have just sort of blundered along for most of it. I can't be entirely dismissive of my blundering, as it has provided me with some really great stories, and some people I just adore, and some accomplishments that I am proud of. But I'd like to try to blunder less; more than anything, I don't want unexamined neurotic habits to define any part of me.

To start with, I'd like to be charming.

Well, that's not quite right. It sounds a bit shallow when I put it like that. Maybe it is. Sometimes I start things a little shallow and, when I am comfortable, go a little deeper. It's how I learned to swim, after all.

But let me clarify by defining my terms. I don't mean I'd like to be a callow man who is full of false smiles and compliments, and flashes sparkling eyes at the ladies and offers firm handshakes and shoulder claps to the men to get what he wants.

No. I am talking about developing the sort of interpersonal skills that other people are honestly charmed by. I don't think I am an entirely uncharming man, so, in some ways, I am really just trying to develop my inner Cary Grant, if you will. I suppose these are, in fact, the sorts of tricks that petty con men use to manipulate, but my intention isn't to pull a fast one on anybody. Were it, I don't think I would be blogging this.

No, my intentions are to be a better Bunny Sparber. People who are legitimately charming are that way because they honestly care and are interested in the people around them. I mean, there are other elements to it, and I will be exploring these. Some of it is pretty superficial, such as good diction and posture. Some of it is pretty formalized, like good manners. Some of it can be a bit unexpected, such as flirting.

But the roots of charm, I think, are having an honest interest and concern for other people. You can be as poised and as dapper as Adonis and, if you are self-centered and unkind, people will nonetheless think you're a schmuck (although they may forgive you for it anyway; it's one of the advantages of being beautiful). On the other hand, you could be a mumbling slob and, if you are generous and fun and friendly and open-hearted, people will cherish you as a friend, unless they are exceptionally superficial.

So the Bunny Charm School will be yet another project in this huge blog of projects, and one in which I try to encourage myself to be the better Bunny -- the one who is kind and friendly -- and discourage myself from being the worser Bunny -- the one who takes pride in his cutting remarks and his ability to ferret out foolishness.

And, then, there will be elocution, and there will be the study of manners, and there will be lessons in flirting. Because those just come with the territory, and interest me.

But I'll be starting where everybody starts, with Dale Carnegie and his book How to Win Friends & Influence People, which is everybody's initial go-to manual on developing personal charm. I'll be reading it over the next few days, and blogging my responses to it, and I will try out Carnegie's suggestions and will report back on them.

If some of you run into me in the next few months and find yourself suddenly going bonkers for me, and know I am working on this project, please remember that there is no trickery afoot. It's just because I adore you, and have been learning how to express it, and that's what you're responding to. We might as well all fall madly in love with each other. It's a lot more fun than complaining.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

DID MY FIRST major pass over "Alcohol" yesterday. The story expanded from about 1,000 words to about twice that many, some of it physical description, some of it additional narrative elements. I have connected the various anecdotes at the start of the tale into a sort of flowing inventory of familial details. I have expanded the part of the story where I go to a juvenile delinquency center, which was just a paragraph in the last draft, into a self-contained narrative. It initially climaxed by not climaxing at all -- I just get out of the center and head out with my fictional alcoholic parents for one final punch line. Now it has an actual climax, and one that comes directly from the familiar details established at the start of the story.

Of course, that means that the second part of the story now has a number of elements that I have just sketched in, because they are new. I shall go through and flesh those out tonight, and then should have a solid draft of the story.

The next step will be to pick at individual sentences -- the small tweaking that I usually don't do, and must. I will go through looking for choppy parts, and overlong sentences, and sentences -- or even individual words -- that can be made more distinct and telling.

I will post the revised draft on Sunday, after I have read it at Ball Cabaret and tweaked it a little more. The process of reading it out loud will give me a sense of how an audience will react to the story, but I will also be looking for areas where I trip in my reading, as those can indicate a confusing sentence. If the author has trouble reading something out loud, there is a real chance the reader will have difficulty with it on the page.

I AM A PLAYWRIGHT AND A THEATER CRITIC.

I think that's been pretty well established. I have reviewed plays, on and off, for more than a decade. I have been a produced playwright for a few years longer, and enjoy a few productions per year; I am currently writing a play for a Minneapolis theater company that will debut in May, and, the following week, will be participating in a weeklong playwrighting festival in Omaha, Nebraska.

And before I say what I am about to, let me say that during this time, I have seen some terrific theater, and think theater is a terrific thing. I don't make much money at it, so obviously I mostly do it out of love.

So with that as a preface, let me then go on to say this: It may be time for us to destroy American theater.

I am fortunate enough to work in Minneapolis, which has a thriving small theater scene. But, even here, I occasionally get the feeling I am wandering through a waxwork museum that offers the preserved remnants of a faded and moribund cultural expression. But there are still new plays being produced in Minneapolis, and a Playwright's Center that encourages the development of new work and strives to find venues for it to be performed, and so, every so often, theater will still seem to have some life to it.

But I agree with Mike Daisey's analysis. A good portion of American theater has painted itself in a corner. It has dedicated its resources to developing expensive physical spaces and expensive full-time staff members, and serves an aging and conservative audience that primarily wants a rotating jukebox of theater classics, musical revues that appeal to their nostalgia, and an occasional Broadway or Off-Broadway hit for a little bit of spice. These theater companies have massive overhead, which makes them loathe to try out untested plays, and they generally don't pay their artistic staff more than a pittance -- and, from my experience, they will on occasion try to cheat their artistic staff out of what hey owe.

This is a deadly combination, with obsolescence built into it: the blue-haired audience that are the backbone of these theaters will die, and, in fact, are already dying. There is no new audience for theater, in general. It discourages innovation, it discourages the development of new work that is specific to a region, and it discourages the development of a professional staff that is artistic, rather than managerial.

But Daisey never touches on the real game-changer. In fact, I suspect I might be the first to broach this idea, and it may be because I am writing from an unusual vantage point as a theater person. But this is what I see happening.

The Internet is going to kill American theater.

I don't mean kill it dead. There will always be small theater companies, usually made up of recent college graduates who studied theater and have a burning desire to do Mamet, or Shepard, or Albee, or whoever. And there will always be community playhouses, although they're going to be smaller and broker down the road.

But the Internet is a massive eraser moving across the American cultural landscape, and it changes everything it touches. And, usually, industries that are transformed by it didn't even know there was a threat, until one day, seemingly without warning, the Internet started doing everything they were doing. It happen with the music industry, it is currently happening with print news, it will happen with PR and advertising. And it will happen with theater.

Theater companies can be alarmingly backwards, technologically speaking. I mean, sure, some of them have Facebook pages, or are on Twitter, but, in general, they still behave like it is 1990. They have people send their scripts in as paper submissions, and they have Web pages made up of sloppy HTML that nobody knows how to fix, and they make almost no use of social media for self-promotion, and get suspicious when its suggest they might. Not all theaters, mind you. But most of them. Chances are, if a theater company is doing something online, it's something that everybody else has been doing for two or three years. So we're not talking about people who look at YouTube and see the end of American theater.

But YouTube is the end of American theater. Because its what people are watching instead of theater. I don't need to make the case that the American theater audience is graying -- anybody who works in theater can tell you that. I suspect it's because theater is not made by young people for young people, and endless productions of Noel Coward aren't going to convince most young audience members to plunk down $25 for a ticket.

But YouTube is not theater, people will protest.

Of course it isn't. It's something new, or, at least, relatively new. And it's something dangerous.

Because the thing that people do when they make theater -- getting together to create a collaborative performance -- can now be done for the sake of the Web, rather than a live audience.

Here is a possible scenario, and one I think is increasingly likely. The sorts of people who used to graduate from college and start theater companies are going to look at what it takes to mount a play. It costs, at the very least, about five thousand dollars, and you spend three weeks rehearsing a play, and three weeks performing it. If you're lucky, you play to an audience of about 100 per show, and then, when it's done, it's done. There is almost no chance you have made your money back in ticket sales, there is a very real chance you will have gotten a fraction of the audience you hoped for, and all of a sudden you realize that, if this is something you want to keep doing, you're going to have to start devoting a lot of your energy into fundraising and self-promotion. And so begins a cycle of desperately seeking funds -- much of it coming out of your own pocket, or your family's pockets, because the local community playhouse has already done a brilliant job of tracking down the people who are likely to donate, and managed to squeeze as much money out of them as they really want to give.

You try and develop an audience, but there isn't much of one out there. Especially if you are doing new work, you're playing mostly to friends and family, because it is increasingly hard to convince anybody else your age to go to the theater to see something they have never heard of. It's hard to get critics to come review your show, because they have cut their budgets for arts coverage, and they're not really that interested in an upstart company that plays to an audience of 15 and does plays nobody has ever heard of. And that's what you do, a few times per year, because you think it's important, and it is supremely unlikely that you'll ever make much of a living at it, with the possible exceptions of theater companies that go after niche markets, like gay and lesbian theater companies.

You could also take that same time and energy to produce a low-budget film that you post online.

"Film" might be the wrong word. What's starting to appear online is something else. It's not what Hollywood puts out, and it is made with very small budgets, often borrowing the techniques of documentary filmmaking and microbudget art films, like the ones Andy Warhol made. If your interest is performance in general, rather than theater specifically, this can be an very appealing option. Let's say you do a work of live theater for three weeks. If you're lucky, you're going to be seen by an audience of 900 or thereabouts.

Online, you can get an audience that size in a day. More. And it can stay online forever, continuing to accrue an audience.

But it's not theater, you protest.

No. And blogs are not newspapers. It doesn't matter. The Internet is a revolution, and revolutions always destroy faster than they build. As important as live performance is, that doesn't mean the Web won't simply roll over it and strip away its audience and its funding. There is a very real possibility many American cities may be without a daily newspaper soon. I'm a newspaperman, and I come from the viewpoint that we need those newspapers. I am also a blogger, and I can tell you that online news is in no way ready to step into the breach left by the collapse of dead-tree journalism. But revolutions don't work like that. Stuff gets broken, stuff we need, and that's just what happens. After a while, the dust settles, and something new emerges.

In 10 years, where will American theater be?

As I see it, we have to choices. We can stand up and say that we are going to fight the forces of inevitability, that the way we have done things is just as good as it ever was, and we'll keep doing it anyway. We could. It's valid. Some will. Noel Coward will always deserve a live audience.

But I am interested in the idea of taking the model of making theater and transposing it to the Web. I don't see it as a threat, but as an opportunity. It may be, in part, because I already do most of my work online, and so am comfortable with the idea. But it's also, in part, because as a playwright, at this moment I am competing with Noel Coward. And when a theater has a massive overhead and an audience whose average age is 50, Noel Coward is always going to win.

And so I have decided to try out this experiment. Next month, I plan to film one of my scripts and put it online. There is no business model for this right now, but that doesn't bother me. Nobody is producing this play anyway, so I'm not losing any money in the deal. I want to see what it is like to do what I would need to do to make a play, but make an online film instead. If it's a sustainable model, I may continue to do it. As always, I'll be documenting the entire process, and so, if other like what they see in what I am doing, they can replicate whatever part of it appeals to them.

I figure, the only advantage I have at this moment over Noel Coward is that he's dead, and so doesn't have Internet access.

I REREAD my story "Alcohol" this morning, in preparing to revise the story. There are two rather tricky elements of the story that presented themselves immediately:

1. It's not really a story; it's more of a collection of punchlines built around a single absurd premise;
2. I kind of like it like that.

So the trick in rewriting the story is not not let it lose it's currently quality of relentless jokiness, but make it feel more like they all belong together. It's pretty gormless now, and that's mostly because it's structured as a series of anecdotes, rather than one narrative bundled together. I think I can retain some of that anecdotal quality, but can bring more of a storytelling sensibility to it by making my characters more active; rather than having things done unto them, they must actively do more.

But my first pass at revision tomorrow is going to mostly be focused on taking what has been sketched in and make it more detailed. Nobody is described in this story. There is no clear location. It's not even certain how many brothers I have. We don't know the time period when this story takes place. In this way, it's one of my most skeletal stories, and that gives me a lot of room for filling in details and allowing them to help shape the anecdotes into something more storylike.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

IN PREPARING to revise my manuscript, I have purchased and am almost finished reading Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore by Elizabeth Lyon, an Oregonian writer who seems to have made a cottage industry out of writing books about how to write fiction, but, as these things go, has published very little fiction herself. I really bought the book to get me into a revising mindset, and it has been good for that, and I suspect for relatively new writers, the book's somewhat rudimentary introduction to many of the basics of storytelling might be quite useful.

But, then, I know there are writers out there who start out writing a story, write the whole thing, realize they have mucked up the ending, rewrite the ending, then realize this changes the start of their story, so rewrite that, and then realize that they have been focusing on the wrong character, and so start from scratch, and, in the end, have been through so many drafts and tried so many approaches to the story that they can't remember what they wanted to say in the first place.

I am not one of those writers. Frankly, I don't even understand those writers. It just seems like such a monumental waste of effort. It already took me a year to write the fake memoir. Had I just fumbled my way through it, like some writers do, it might have taken a half-decade. And I am not overly precious about my writing: I am not attempting to transform literature, or write one of the books that defines a generation, or write for posterity. I don't think you can plan for that; it just sort of happens to books that happen to capture the zeitgeist, and sometimes happens long after you expect it to.

So all I am trying to do is write stories that I enjoy, and stories that are funny and have an unexpected premise. Some of it is pure frippery -- although, for the most part, I left the slightest stories out of the actual manuscript. So what can I do, first of all to make sure that these stories are worth publishing as a book, and second of all to make sure they are worth rereading?

WHY I AM OPPOSED TO OVERWORKING A STORY
The first part is tricky, because I genuinely think that overworking a story can kill it. Not only do I not mind a bit of roughness, but I think it is necessary. Once authors know what story they want to tell, they have a tendency to go through and make every element considered and necessary, but, for my tastes, that also often strips out any sense of discovery or the unexpected. Fiction is not the building of a stopwatch, where every element must be perfectly placed to make the machine run. No, the elements of a story must feel that they progress logically, but many authors try to make them feel necessary or inevitable. Pauline Kael often spoke about how truly creative work often seems undisciplined, and truly great work is rarely immaculately crafted, and I agree with her.

I think a lot of writers mistake the act of revising for the act of perfecting, so they turn to instructional manuals that teach them how to sand the rough edges off their writing. But art is not perfectible, and that will not be my approach in my revision process.

Instead, I think revising is about heightening and fleshing out. Because it is the rough edges of writing where creativity really lives. Those are the places where surprises can happen, and those are the places where a writer wasn't certain of what they were doing, and so the possibilities are larger.

So I will be going through my stories, not with an eye for cleaning them up, but with an eye for where something might be rough and sketched in, and where I can explore further, so long as that exploration benefits the stories.

MAN WITH THE HAT WRITING
My stories really are like pencil sketches now. There is a moment in Throw Mama from the Train where Danny DeVito describes the plot to a short story he has written" "The man with the hat kills the other man with the hat." I am a man with the hat writer. Every one of those scenes in which a character is just jotted down can be revised to include telling descriptions. Every moment in which a motivation is hinted at can be expanded. And it can head off in strange directions -- one of my favorite scenes in Mulholland Drive is one which a hit man goes to assassinate a man in an office. But he accidentally shoots through a wall, hitting someone in the next room, and so must go kill that person as well. And then someone else stumbles into the scene, and must be dispatched, and, for a moment, it seems likely that the hit man is just going to keep on killing people who are unrelated to the original assassination, perhaps forever. In theory, a scene like this is a throwaway. It doesn't really forward the plot, and the assassin and all the characters in it are part of a minor subplot that a really plot-driven editor might suggest cutting.

And that would be a shame. Because, the truth is, one you know the plot, and once you have seen how it plays out, there is very little reason to revisit the story. It's these odd digressions and unexpected moments that cause us to return to a work of art, because they continue to be interesting and puzzling, even when the story is known.

More than anything, this is what I need to preserve in my stories, when it is already there, and expand upon when it is hinted at. That will be how I look at my story in terms of structure, and in terms of an overall overhaul.

But I also write in a fairly deadpan voice when I do my first draft. And that's useful for getting the bones of a story down. Further, I think that voice is exceptionally useful when describing absurdity. For my tastes, the ridiculous is best presented in as unadorned, unremarkable a way as possible.

But I think I rely on that voice overmuch, and part of the pleasure of reading is the pleasure of language. I'm not talking about baroque sentence structures or showy vocabulary usage, either. I'm talking about distinct and unexpected turns of phrase. I don't think that's entirely absent from my writing just now, and I think it can be overused, but really distinct moments in a story benefit from a really distinct telling.

WHEN, AND HOW, I WILL USE PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
One other thing I will be looking at will be physical descriptions. As I mentioned earlier, I tend toward "man with a hat" writing, and sometimes this is for the best. Especially in stories that have a cartoonish quality, it can benefit the story to present characters as rough caricatures and let the readers fill in the details, and I must always be conscious of never cutting the reader completely out of the process. Fiction is, after all, an act of co-creation with your reader, and engaging their imagination by allowing them a hand in the invention is important (and, I think, often overlooked). But those decisions should, by and large, be deliberate.

Description is a tricky thing, because people sometimes just want to go on and on and draw a complete portrait with words. But description, for my tastes, works best when it reveals character -- actually, I think everything works best when it reveals character. I don't care if a character's eyes are blue, unless that tells me something I need to know about them. If they have a scar, though, and there is a story behind that scar, I am going to want to hear it. Scar stories are always interesting.

So I will be replacing my men in hats with fuller descriptions, and will be describing the world they live in in greater detail, but always with an eye to what we learn about the characters from these descriptions.

OPEN-SOURCING THIS BAD BOY
The first story I will be working will be "Alcohol." I will be reading it this coming Saturday at Balls Cabaret, and so that will be the first story I plan to really put through the process. I'll be working it all week, for a few reasons. Firstly, because this is the first story I will be revising, I want to give myself extra time for the process, so that I can really explore it. Secondly, it is one of my jokier stories, and the trick is to take those stories and make them fun to reread, even when you already know the jokes. I will be documenting the whole process, as much as I can, and will simply republish the revised version, leaving the original draft up on this site if people ever want to compare the stories, before and after. This might be something that is only of interest to me, of course, but I have gotten a little obsessed with doing these projects using a sort-of open source approach.

In that spirit, for anybody who wants to know some of the specifics of what I am doing, here are the details:

1. I called Leslie Ball, of Balls Cabaret, to sign up for a slot for next Saturday. I have appeared there a dozen or so times over the last decade -- it's one of my favorite places to try out new projects. Anybody can do it, although if you have never been to one of her cabarets before, Leslie asks that you attend one first.

2. I set up a Facebook Page for the project. If you are a member of Facebook, this is as simple as going to the "groups" tab and clicking "start a new group."

3. I set up a Google calendar so people can follow readings and other events related to this project. If you are already signed up for Google's calendar, this is done by clicking :create" under "my calendars" on the left-hand side of the page, and creating your own calendar. When you plug an event into the calendar, you can then then choose to label it as part of that specific calendar. Under "settings," you can then make that calendar public and grab some code to stick it onto your Web page.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

ON APRIL 18, 2009, officially declared "Tony Kushner Day" in Minneapolis by Mayor RT Rybak, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright speaks at the Guthrie Theater at the start of their Kushner Festival.

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MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, on March 5, 2008, on a whim, I sat down to write a fake memoir. I had been reading about a rash of fabricated autobiographies that had bedeviled the publishing industry, and it amused me to think of doing this on purpose, without pretense. Like others, my fake memoir would be a series of outrageous stories about my life; unlike others, mine would be labeled as being fake -- right in the title.

And so here it is, 13 months later, and I have written, oh, perhaps 110,000 words, a total of 57 short stories. I have whittled this down to 50 or thereabouts, for a total of 80,000 words, or a 300-page book, give or take a few pages. I have killed myself numerous times, once returning as a ghost. I have been a pimp, a killer of men, a drug addict, and a stripper. I have met bigfoot, fought off ninjas, and discovered that I am a nephew of Hitler. None of it is true, although some of it is sort-of true -- a lot of my real biography somehow got mixed in with my fake one. Now the first draft is finished, and I celebrated today by buying myself a glass of 12-year-old Jameson.

Those of you who know me know this isn't much of a treat. I am liable to buy myself a glass of 12-year-old Jameson, or Red Breast, or Black Bush, just because I happen to be within a mile of an Irish bar and I am bored. I didn't throw myself into a celebratory mood, because there really isn't that much to completing the first draft of a book, even one as weird as mine. Thousands of writers do it every year -- heck, thousands of writers do it in the month of November alone, for the National Novel in a Month competition. And, for almost all of them, their manuscript will remain safely tucked into a file on their computer hard drive, which is the modern equivalent of stuffing it in a sock drawer.

But I didn't write this to fill up space on my hard drive. I wrote it for publication. And so now the next step of the process begins -- revising the thing.

I've never been much of one for revising. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I write a lot, and very fast. I have to. For a decade I wrote for, and sometimes still write for, newsweeklies, where the turnaround time on a story is very fast. And I often wrote two or three stories per week. Now I write for the Web, and sometimes write two blog entries per day, most coming in between 600 and 1200 words per post. You learn to write fast, and to edit as you go, so that the story you submit won't need more than a little tweaking before it gets published.

And that's fine for what I have written. Newsweeklies, and the Web, are a quick moving media. They're not really meant to be read slowly, or reread.

Books are a bit different, or, at least, probably should be. There is a permanence to the form that invites rereading, when a book is good. After all, you buy a book, and then what? It sits on your shelf? You give it to Goodwill? No, if it's something you enjoy, or something that challenges you, you go back and read it again. It behooves someone who is writing for this sort of publication to make their text worth revisiting.

But, as I have said, I am not one who has ever done much revising. And so we begin the next stage in my Fake Memoir project, the stage in which I teach myself how to revise. So far, there are two things I will be doing. Firstly, I will be reading my stories out loud in front of an audience, which I find a useful tool for gauging how well a story is working. Secondly, I will be reading up on techniques for revising stories. And, one by one, I will put every one of the stories in my Fake Memoir through the process, until I feel that I have a book worth rereading.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

IT HAS GOTTEN a lot harder for me as a theater critic since the whole world went Jewish.

At first is was exciting. If you were lucky, a University theater company might do a play like S. Ansky's The Dybbuk once per decade, and mostly as an experiment in Expressionism. These productions were never great and they were never performed in Yiddish. But Ansky's play is inherently theatrical, and no matter how many times you read it as a script, you're never going to get a real sense of the play as a living example of theater without seeing it performed.

Two months ago, the Guthrie Theater did The Dybbuk. In Yiddish. What's more, they featured Seth Rogan in the lead. A few years ago, when Rogan was known as a heavyset comic lead actor in stoner films, I might have pooh-poohed his casting. But since the world world went Jewish -- and particularly since Rogan himself began wearing a yarmulke and fringes when he performs -- he has become the one of cinema's most sought-after lead actors, and has matured into a terrific performer. He was a revelation as Hannan, the Talmudic scholar in love with a possessed woman.

I interviewed him when he was in town for the production. We met at Kieran's, formerly an Irish bar that was one of the first to switch over to a Jewish theme. Rogan was dressed in a black kaftan and fur hat, and we talked over shots of Slivovitz. "I always thought hasids were, you know, cool looking," he told me. "I never thought I'd dress like one. I don't know, maybe it just seemed to Jewy to me, or something. But now it seems like people can't get enough of this sort of thing."

He shrugged and laughed. "This has all been good for me," he said. "Very, very good for me."

It was the fifth production of The Dybbuk I had reviewed that year. The trouble is, there isn't that much Jewish theater, or, at least, the sort audiences want to see, and that's all anybody wants to do nowadays. There has been a bit of interest in reviving playwrights like Arthur Miller and Neil Simon, but audiences aren't really looking for plays in which the characters are incidentally Jewish, or their Jewishness is treated as some sort of comic quirk. They want plays that seem, to them, to be the most authentic expression of the Jewish experience.

I call it the Convert's Disorder. I've known a lot of people who have converted to Judaism in their life, and, for the first few years, they are aggressive about demonstrating their seriousness. They attend synagogue as frequently as they can, they join Jewish organizations, they develop forceful pro-Israel politics, and they throw Yiddishisms into their everyday conversation. Worse still, they sneer at people like me. I've always been a Jew, or, at least, since I was adopted when I was 16 days old. I am proudly secular. I don't attend synagogue, I don't observe the holidays, and I never feel any need to make a show of how Jewish I am. Converts sometimes regard me suspiciously -- perhaps because they are so enchanted with the experience of being Jewish, because it is so new to them, that they can't understand why I would view that experience with such blithe disregard.

Well, the whole world is now Jewish, and they are all recent converts, and they get quite annoyed with me.

But the trouble is, new Jews have bad taste. Let me give you an example. There has been no Kushner. Too gay, I expect. But there have been seven productions of Fiddler on the Roof this year alone. Now, Fiddler is not a bad musical, but it overreaches. Sholem Aleichem, who write the original stories, was primarily a humorist, and when the musical's script captures Aleichem's breezy sense of the absurd, it's great fun. But the three men who adapted Aleichem's stories for the stage -- Bock, Harnick and Stein -- tried to make the stories represent some sort of universal old world Jewish experience, and it all gets to be a bit much. So we have Cossacks dancing with bottles in an early scene and Cossacks instigating a pogrom in a later scene, and Tevye, the main character, has to meet every single cliche of the Russian Jewish experience between his encounters with Cossacks. These include rabbis, carping wives, unworldly scholars, and ghosts. Any one of these stories might have made a good musical, but Bock, Harnick and Stein had to put them all in, and the resulting musical is, frankly, a mess.

But try telling that to a readership of new converts, all of whom are entranced by the play's recreation of a period in time that they desperately want to feel profoundly connected to.

I have gotten angry letters. And, gah! You don't even want to read the responses I got when I complained that I never felt the Diary of Anne Frank was a good stage adaptation and I never want to see it again. There was a death threat. An honest-to-goodness death threat. There used to be no crossover between the sorts of Jews who went to plays and the sorts of Jews who threatened lives. Actually, there were so few Jews who felt comfortable making threats of physical harm that the subject just never came up.

Not anymore.

Here's the problem: You remember those people you used to in newspapers, who would spend weekends at gun shows and would protest at the capitol with hand-scrawled signs reading "NO COMMUNISS IS GOING TO TAKE MY GUNS"?

They're Jews now, and they go to the theater.

Sometimes I just want to slap Oprah. Now, I know that she's not exclusively responsible for this unexpected worldwide mass conversion. She was just part of a strange zeitgeist that probably started with the celebrity infatuation with Kabala a few years ago, and eventually turned into a wave of high-profile celebrities converting. But it when Oprah documented her conversion that things hit critical mass. Previously, it had been somewhat difficult to convert to Judaism, requiring months of committed study. After Oprah, unscrupulous businessmen recognized there was quite an opportunity here, and suddenly you could convert to Judaism just by visiting a Web page and clicking a button. Before Oprah, there was a steady trickle of new converts. After her, it was a monsoon.

I remember when it first really struck me. I was walking past the Hubert H Metrodome after a Twins game. A car passed, and I noticed everybody in it was wearing yarmulkes with the Twins' logo on it. A mustached man in the passenger seat took a cigarette out of his mouth, leaned out the window, and screamed at me.

He screamed "Go home, Goy!"

Suddenly, I saw these new Jews everywhere. The Lubavitcher Hasidim are sort of notorious for their "Mitzvah mobiles" -- cars that drive around Jewish neighborhoods and try to proselytize Hasidic Judaism to other Jews. Suddenly, these vehicles were getting swarmed by crowds of people, eager to learn how to keep kosher and bind phylacteries. Local synagogues had to add extra services on Shabbos to contend with overflow, and then supplemental services, and then rent additional space, and then move into larger buildings. John Zorn and Peter Himmelman suddenly appeared on the playlists of alternative radio stations, while oldies stations suddenly began to program the Yiddish swing of the Barry Sisters. Grocery stores added kosher sections, and then, suddenly, everything was kosher. The pork industry collapsed, but, on the flip side, the pickled herring industry exploded.

The Jews I knew -- the ones who had grown up Jewish -- responded to this with a mix of puzzlement and bemusement. A few of my male Jewish friends loved it -- suddenly, they were in high demand as sexual partners, and they took advantage of this opportunity to bed every blond German girl who previously had seemed out of their reach, but now cried out "Oy! Hashem!" when they climaxed. At that time, at the start of all this, there was a certain status conferred on Jews who had been born Jews; they were looked on with envy, and were, for a while, very much in demand at parties and in social organizations. I wasn't afforded that status, having been adopted. With my blue eyes and Irish features, I was seen as being just another convert. While other Jews were out drinking plum brandy during Mishna night at locals bars, I was home watching television and wonder when Letty Cottin Pogrebin got her own talk show on the FOX network.

The truth is, I seem to be the only one bothered by this. I go to friends' houses and see that they now have prints by Agam hanging from their walls, and I roll my eyes. Every time I see a teenage girl on the lightrail, nodding her head in time to music from her iPod, and see a gold chai dangling down between her exposed cleavage, I shake my head. I don't even want to know what music she is listening to -- some dreadful boy band, no doubt, performing four-part harmony vocal klezmer. I have been hearing a lot of Yiddish lately, but Yiddish was mostly a dead language before the whole world became Jewish, and so, when people try to speak it in the streets, it's is halting and false and taken from textbooks. "Der tate hob est der hunt," a businessman will say on his cell phone. Really? The father has eaten the dog? Is that what you meant to say?

Religious Jews are thrilled by this. They point to a passage in the Torah in which God tells Abraham that Jews will one day be as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach, and they say that this is the moment that has been predicted. Secular Jews, in the meanwhile, predict the end of antisemitism, and are thrilled that Israel is finally safe. After all, now that the surrounding Arab states have converted to Judaism en masse, they hold no ill-will toward the Jewish state.

I don't want to be cynical, but it's hard not to be. After all, I've never seen Jews as being that much different from everyone else. We have our problems, and our petty squabbled, and can be just as small-minded and poorly behaved as everybody else. And now we are everybody else. Jews have never been in the majority, as we are now. Is there any reason to think we might be any good at it?

The news tonight reported on a fight in Crown Heights. A group of Italian Jews went after a group of Haitian Jews with a baseball bat. It's not the first time Italians and Haitians have fought in Crown Heights, but this time they were fighting about whether or now swordfish is kosher.

I got another death threat today, as the result of my review of the Gefilte Playhouse's production of Talley's Folly. I'm sorry, but I found it to be an unexceptional production with a very weak lead performance. But one angry reader apparently disagreed, and, in his letter, told me I am "wose than Hilter and will die like a nazi."

In the past few weeks, I have started stocking up on Jameson. In private, I have been teaching myself Penny Whistle. There is a clandestine group that meets to learn traditional céilidh dances, and I have joined them. I've been working my way through Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Last night, me and a few like-minded friends gathered in my apartment to watch The Quiet Man.

You need something to fall back on, in case things get crazy.

But, I'll tell you this: If Oprah ever decides she's Irish, I'll kill her.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I HAVE FORGOTTEN what it is like not to have sore hands.

When I let my hands recover for a day or so, I can close my trainer gripper three or four times with my right hand and one or two times with my left hand. Of course, I rarely let my hands rest for a day or two, but, instead, sort of obsessively squeeze my gripper, clenching it as close to shut for as long as I can. The results are that my hands are usually as weak as a kitchen, as Bela Legosi is supposed to have said. I'll take tomorrow off.

They aren't as sore as they were at the start. That is to say, they aren't useless. My pinkies still sometimes ache when I clench them, but, when I think about what my hands were like last week -- well, sometimes they almost feel normal. So there's only one thing to do:

Trade up to the Captains of Crush No. 1 Gripper. The trainer I have been using provides about 100 pounds of resistance. The No. 1 is more like 140 pounds. It arrived in the mail today, and I gave it a few exploratory squeezes, and could barely close the thing halfway. Of course, I was squeezing it with hands that are weak from exercise -- come Sunday, when I have given them a chance to heal a bit, we'll see how well I do. I shall begin using my Trainer for warm-ups and my No. 1 for the real workouts, and so I won't be surprised if the intense soreness I felt when I first got these returns. On the other hand, I also won't be surprised if, a week or two from now, I am closing the Trainer with very little effort, over and over again, and can squeeze it shut for extended periods. I'll be glad when this is the case. It's never fun to be at the start of something like this, because exercises don't so much make you feel stronger than they remind you of how weak you are. But once I can squeeze the No. 1 shut, I'll have a grip that won't embarrass me, even if I will not yet be at the point of having a grip capable of awesome feats of strength.

There's always that metaphor for getting things done that puts you at the bottom of a mountain, looking up. Well, that metaphor doesn't work for me. I never seem to start at the bottom. Instead, I seem to start in some prehistoric world thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, and I must climb out of that before I can even reach the base of the mountain. For me, the first step in learning how to do anything is to just get to the point that everybody else is at already.

But I'm like that little cognitively impaired boy in that Sean Astin film where he just wants to play for the Fighting Irish, despite the fact that he is too small and too poor to attend Notre Dame, aside from being mentally challenged. Nonetheless, despite tremendous odds, he ends up playing for the Irish for, like, a minute at the end of the film.

What? He wasn't supposed to be mentally challenged? Jesus Christ. And here I was thinking at least I had one up on Rudy.

THE DOG DEFECATED on the living room rug last night. When I discovered it this morning, I tortured him.

I'm not a sadist. I believe in a proportional response. So it was just a little bit of torture. Just enough to let him know that he needs to take his business outside.

It's hard for me to imagine there was a time when people thought torture didn't work. My child used to be a poor student. He's not stupid, he just lacked discipline. He wouldn't do all his homework, and would daydream in class. I worked closely with his teachers to come up with a program of torture that addressed the boy's specific needs. He's a honor student now.

My eggs were a bit runny this morning, so I'll be torturing the wife when I get home tonight. On the other hand, I forgot to take the garbage out before I left, so I might get some of it back. I have it coming.

Reading the morning paper, I read an editorial I didn't like. I used to feel an impotent annoyance upon reading these, as all I could do was write an angry response to the editor, which they might or might not choose to publish. But now, if I feel strongly enough, I can just go down to the newspaper and torture the columnist for a while.

I went to catch the bus to work. I left a little late, and so did not have proper change ready when the bus pulled up. The bus driver rolled his eyes, then tortured me for a few seconds. The torture was painful enough, but far worse was the embarrassment I felt. This was the third such torturing I had received in the past month. What will it take for me to be ready with the right amount of money?

Torture has made the workplace brisk and efficient. We have weekly quotas, and, if we don't make them, we face a pretty stern torturing. We tend to make our quotas. There are also smaller punishments for minor offenses, such as neglecting to shave or coming to work in a suit that needs a dry cleaning. This is a business that depends on presenting a tidy, conservative image. I once accidentally wore mismatched socks and was tortured for it. I couldn't be angry. My boss once tortured himself for forgetting to get a manicure. He always leads by example.

I work in the collections department, which was once a difficult job. You can call and harass people about owed money all day long and get nowhere. Now that we torture, though, it's a breeze. At least half of my workday is spent making collections calls. I enjoy getting out of the office in the company car, especially when the weather is nice, and usually you don't have to torture someone for more than a few minutes before they cough up what they owe.

There was an especially tough case today, though. An old man. He was small and pale and bent, and he told me that we were in error, and that he had already paid his bill. I told him this matter wasn't really my business. I was just sent out to collect. If he liked, he could pay me, and then, once he had made his case to the company, he would get his money back. We're not an unreasonable company, and mistakes are made, and we have a system in place to address such errors. This system mostly involves torturing the accountant who made the error, and so, as you can imagine, such errors are rare, but they happen now and again.

For whatever reason, this didn't satisfy him. Some people just need to be difficult, I guess. So I explained that I would not be leaving without the money, and I explained to him our collections technique.

"You're going to torture me?" he asked, furious. "You're going to torture me to get money I don't owe?"

I told him I would prefer not to, but, as far as I knew, he did owe the money, and it was my job to get it.

"What has happened to this country?" he asked. "We used to have some sense of decency. What happened?"

This sort of talk annoys me. I wonder if people who say things like that remember what things were like before torture? How hard it was to get anything done. How there didn't seem to be any sense of responsibility or accountability. It was a world in which people thought they could get away with just about anything. Things are better now, and I know it, but there never seems to be much point arguing about it. In the end, it didn't matter what the old man thought.

I tortured him for a while, but he set his jaw and closed his eyes, and nothing I did got me anywhere. Some people are like that. You have to come back two or three times before they give in. It's like they are trying to make a point that torture doesn't work. But, of course, they eventually give up what they owe, and so they haven't proven anything, except that stubborn people are always going to get a heck of a lot more pain then they need.

I tried to make a date with the old man for when I would come back, but he refused to speak to me. No matter. I don't really need an appointment. I can just drop whenever. I left him my card, in case he changed his mind and wanted to pay up before I came back. Then I left.

He lived in a nice neighborhood. His street was lined with little ramblers, cute little homes with neat little lawns. He had the money; there was no reason for him to be obstinate.

On my way back to the company car, I noticed that one of the houses on the block was run down. It's paint job was faded and peeling, and the lawn was brown and and overgrown. I shook my head. Who lives like that? I would never stand for a house like that in my neighborhood, crapping up the block and bringing down everybody's property values. I'm a reasonable man, so I'd go over and have a little talk with the homeowner. Of course, if he didn't care about what I had to say, I'd torture him for a while. Anybody would. The people on this block would be right to do the same, just to knock some sense into their neighbor's head.

I got to the company car and got in. I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.

Shit.

My company is protective of the company cars. They buy a new fleet of Cadillacs every year, and they have a dozen mechanics at the garage to maintain the cars and keep them clean, because this is a business where you can't afford to look bad. If I called in to the office and said one of the new Caddies had stalled, they would assume it was somehow my fault. There are some pretty stiff punishments for that.

I got out of the car and opened the hood. I don't own a car of my own, and not mechanically inclined, and so staring at the car's engine did nothing for me. I reached around and found every tube and cable connected to the engine. I disconnected and reconnected them, hoping that this might get the car running again. It didn't.

Not knowing what else to do, I tortured the engine for a while. This did not work.

I walked in a slow circle around the car, looking for something else to torture. I tried torturing the ignition switch, but that did nothing, and then I torturing the steering column. Still the car would not start. I looked below the dashboard and found the car's fuses, and I tortured them for a minute or two. Nothing.

God damn it!

There was nothing for it to call the office. I went to find a payphone, but it was not working, so I tortured it. I went to a nearby house to see if I could use their phone, but there was nobody home, so I tortured their door for a while. I tripped on their stone walkway while I was leaving, so I tortured that. When I tripped, I hurt my knee, and it would not stop hurting, so I tortured it. The pain was intense enough that I accidentally let out a little whimper, so I tortured my mouth. While I was tugging my last remaining tooth, it began to rain, so I climbed a light pole to torture the sky. I fell out, and, in frustration, I tortured myself the entire way down.

I had it coming.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

THERE WERE OTHER PEOPLE IN THE AIR.

It had been a surprising day. I suppose the least surprising part of it is that a gust of wind blew me out of the window of my apartment and carried me aloft, hundreds of feet in the air, high above the city. It was, after all, an especially windy day. Nervous weathermen had interrupted the news all day long to warn of the possibilities of tornadoes. I ignored this. After all, I lived in downtown Minneapolis, and when was the last time a tornado passed through the middle of this city? It's the sort of thing that strikes small, rural towns, tearing up farmhouses and feed lots, not office towers and brownstone apartment buildings, like the one I lived in.

But at 5 in the afternoon, the skies turned green and alarms went off through the city. I went to the window to look. The window shattered, and I was blown out and into the air, where I remained. So that was a little unexpected.

But I certainly didn't expect to run into anybody else up here.

I wasn't in the air more than a few minutes before I saw a man in a chalk-colored suit passing me in the other direction. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear and seemed to be speaking eagerly. He passed me without seeming to notice me. I called out to him, but the sound of the storm drowned out my voice.

A moment later, I saw a woman I recognized. She was a thin, ancient woman who lived in the condo down the street from me, and I often saw her walking her two toy poodles. She now had a poodle tucked under each arm, and she seemed to be speaking to them. As I passed, she looked up and saw me. I waved, and she shook her head, eyes raised, as if to communicate that she didn't understand what was happening.

The next two people I passed seemed to have been plucked out of a tattoo parlour. One still sat in a leather doctors chair, arm rolled up, while the other leaned over him and worked on his arm with a tattoo needle. Both men wore t-shirts emblazoned with images of hard rock bands, and both had long, greasy hair. They saw me pass, and the one in the chair leaned up to show me his arm. His tattoo was mostly completed, and showed cars and trucks swirling around a tornado. The tattoo artist gave me a thumbs up gesture, while the man in the leather doctor's chair grinned a sort of perverse grin, with his tongue extended, and pumped his fist. Then they were gone.

I flew alone for a while. I don't know for how long. Occasionally, the sky around me would light up, sometimes off in the distance, sometimes very close, and would be followed by a thunderclap. Once in a while, I could just make out the city below me. I saw tornado after tornado. They seemed to be taking Minneapolis apart.

I next passed a couple on a bed making love. Their lovemaking was enviably enthusiastic, and there was a third man on the bed with a video camera, filming. They waved as they passed, and I waved back. As I waved, the cameraman filmed me. They called out to me, but I could not hear them, and then they gestured for me to join them, but I could not control where the wind blew me.

Bullets flew past me, from underneath me, seemingly in slow motions. They pushed aside the clouds, leaving a clear trail behind them, flying upward. I looked down and saw a man in baggy pants and sunglasses firing a pistol. At first, I thought he was shooting at me, but then I noticed he was looking past me, to someone higher up. I looked up. There was a heavy man in a truckers cap and lumberjack shirt holding a shotgun. He leaned down and fired, and the blast scattered out, again seemingly in slow motion, again tearing a series of clear trails through the clouds. The men screamed at each other inaudibly as they passed me and continued to fire on each other, but the source of their animosity was not clear.

I continued alone for a while. I could not stand the sound of the storm anymore, so I pulled my shirt over my head, clutching it closed. Inside my shirt, it was dark and the sounds were muffled. I found myself wondering how long I could continue flying above the city like this, and what would happen when I fell back to earth. It seemed likely I would die.

I felt a tapping on my shoulder and came back out of my shirt to see who it might be. The person who had tapped had already flown far past me, and was just a silhouette in the distance. They waved and I waved back, and I wondered if it was somebody I knew. I looked around and noticed the sky was filled with similar silhouettes. There might have been a hundred people in the air around me. There might have been a thousand.

I passed the mayor. We passed close enough that he was able to reach out and shake my hand as he passed, which he did vigorously, smiling at me. The mayor had a big smile with teeth that seemed artificially white, and he winked at me as we shook hands. He gave my arm a comforting pat, and then blew past me. I watched him disappear into the distance. Whenever he got close enough to someone else, he likewise seized their hand and patted their shoulders. I don't know why, but I found this comforting.

The air cleared a little, and I could see the city below me again. I was looking at a high-rise apartment building, and there was a gash torn in it, right near the top of the building. A stream of people were pouring out of the hole and skyward, all of them seemingly caught in mid-activity. One was ironing clothes. Two were playing a computer game, and their television set came with them. A man and a woman physically fought each other, biting and tearing hair. An infant tugged on a cat's tail, and the cat turned and hissed. A man played with himself, eyes closed, oblivious. All of them floated upward, past me, like a plume of smoke, disappearing into the clouds above me.

Rain splashed my face, and I realized I was thirsty. I cupped my hands and they filled with water, and I drank the water. The rain soaked my clothes, and I suddenly felt very cold. I shivered. The wind blew across my wet clothes, making them frigid. I began to notice ice. It occurred to me that I might freeze to death before I fell to the ground. I did not know if this was a better or worse way to die.

There were now so many people in the air that it was impossible to avoid regularly bumping into them. All clutched themselves, freezing. Some linked arms as they passed and then held each other. A young woman hooked arms with me and pressed very close to me. She was shivering, but her body felt warm to me. She pulled off my shirt and I watched it float away. Then she pulled off her own shirt and wrapped her arms around me. Her body warmed me up. We did not speak to each other, but simply flew through the air together, embracing each other.

Others locked on to us and likewise stripped off their shirts, and then the rest of their clothes. They pulled at my pants, which came off. They pressed against me. I did not mind. I appreciated the warmth. We flew together for a ways like this, as a large group of strangers, bundled into a protective ball, until the winds carried us up and over the clouds. Daylight broke around us, and warmth. Slowly, we released our grip on each other. We shook hands and and nodded our thanks to each other, and then flew off in different directions.

I was so high in the air that I could see the curve of the earth on the horizon, and could see the place where the atmosphere tapered off into space. There were thousands of people in the air above me. Perhaps millions. All ascended slowly, as I did, pushing toward the sky. Above them, the sun was blinding, looking huge and hot. Suddenly I no longer worried about crashing back down to earth. We seemed to be heading toward space. I did not know what would happen. Would we freeze before we got there? Would we suffocate?

Someone I knew passed me. He was a journalist, and I had worked with him at a local newsweekly for a few years. Like me, he was now naked. He smiled when he saw me, and spoke. But the air was thin and he was far away, so all I heard were muffled sounds. He saluted me like a soldier when he passed, and I saluted him back. He gestured downward, and I looked.

The sky beneath me was dotted, and, in many places, blackened, with little figures, from horizon to horizon. The entire human race, it seemed, had been pulled off the earth and into the sky. We had always thought the world would end, but I don't think we imagined it would happen like this. I should have been terrified. Instead, I gaped at the beauty of it. I had never felt so small in my life. The whole of the earth was spread out beneath me, larger than I could have imagined, and we people had just been pinpricks on the surface, now cast off, seemingly, with a shrug.

I noticed I was breathing very hard. The air I breathed in was cold and dry and unsatisfying, and I felt winded. Above me, figures floated serenely, eyes closed. I suspected they were already unconscious, and I would soon be too.

What had happened? Was it some sort of cataclysm, or was the world simply done with us? Had we become enough of an annoyance the the surface had rejected us, the way a horse's skin rejects a fly that lands on it?

But there seemed to be no point to wondering. I was never going to know the answer. And I didn't mind. I felt a strange cheerfulness, an odd sense of comfort, the way you feel when you are safely in bed and you are about to fall asleep.

I looked up and saw the stars. I stared at them in amazement. I had never known that they were so beautiful.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

SOMEHOW, I managed to lose two pounds between last week and this, so I am down to 175.5. I wasn't expecting this to be the case, perhaps because I had veggie bangers and mash and two glasses of whiskey, along with some pia a la mode, the other night. which is a bigger meal than usual for me. That puts me 3 1/2 pounds away from my next goal of 172, which is when I will have lost half of the total amount of weight I am planning to lose. I've lost almost 30 pounds at this point, but, in a classic example of the dysmorphia that accompanies weight loss, I sometimes don't feel like I have lost very much at all, perhaps because the weight loss has happened in increments over four and a half months. So, to clarify for myself the changes that have happened since I have begun:

1. I have lost enough weight to drop two pants sizes
2. I now look like I am swimming in my underwear
3. I have started to see my cheekbones
4. Everybody comments that I look thinner
5. I can easily fit into clothes that were far too snug on me
6. My arms have gotten quite a lot thinner

I have been focusing on my stomach and my neck, which seem to be the areas that are stubbornly retaining weight, which is no surprise: this is where I first started showing weight gain, and so will be the last and the slowest to lose it. But the shape of my face in general is getting a lot more defined, and my midsection has moved from being a ring that wrapped around me to just a stomach that protrudes somewhat. I'm curious at what point that will all disappear, and when my weight loss from move from me erasing whatever visible fat I have to when my weight loss makes me start looking thin. If I recall correctly, it was at about the weight 150 when my stomach began to show, so I am guessing when I begin dropping from 150 to my target weight of 140 is when I will start looking Rock Star Skinny, the stated goal of this project.

I have been taking photographs of myself every other week to chart my weight loss through the normal range of the Body Mass Index. As I have mentioned, for me there is about a 40 pound difference between the top of that range and the bottom, and I am now almost 5 pounds into it. The photos don't look greatly different from one to another, but I suspect when I have lopped off 15 pounds or so the differences between the first and the last will be quite marked.

More Rock Star Skinny.

I WAS 6 YEARS OLD when I got my first doll.

My mother saw me playing with it at the toy store. It was 1974, and my mother was a fan of Marlo Thomas, and that was the year Ms. Thomas had produced and appeared in a television special called Free to Be ... You and Me. The show included football player Rosey Grier singing about how it was all right to cry, and Ms. Thomas herself narrating a Shel Silverstein story about a bossy little girl who is punished for demanding gender-based privileges. And then Ms. Thomas appeared again, along with Alan Alda, who my mother knew from the television show M*A*S*H, as well as from his many appearances on the cover of Ms. Magazine, and they told a story about a little boy who had a doll, and was teased for it, but whose parents came to understand that the boy was simply expressing a desire to explore parenting, and this might one day make him a better father. There was nothing feminine about it, and, if we weren't so blinded by our dated notions about what little boys and little girls should be like, we'd understand this.

So my mother did what any self-respecting Marlo Thomas fan would do, and she bought me the doll.

My father, who only knew Marlo Thomas from That Girl, was not pleased. He found me in my bedroom, cuddling my little doll and telling it stories, and he watched me for a while and then marched downstairs, to where my mother was decoupaging a coffee table with cartoon images of owls. My father was a soft-spoken man, an academic who tended to suck thoughtfully on a pipe, and he rarely questioned my mother's parenting decisions. But he had been raised in a rather tough neighborhood in Brownsville, and knew children could be very cruel to each other, and so he gently questioned her.

"Dear?" he asked pleasantly. "Did you happen to notice that Bunny is playing with a doll?"

My mother did not look up from her decoupaging. "Yes," she said. "I bought it for him."

"Yes, I sort of though you had," my father said amiably. "But doesn't it seem a bit girlish?"

My mother slammed down her box of cartoon owls and glared up at him. She then rose and left the room. He went to find her, and discovered that she had locked herself in the bathroom door, and was audibly crying. He knocked gently.

"Dear," he said. "Dear, I didn't mean to upset you."

She spoke with difficulty from inside the bathroom, gasping slightly. "Bunny is many things," she said. "He's sweet and warm and gentle and kind. But he is not girlish."

My father chewed his pipe thoughtfully as I walked past, clutching my doll, and went into the living room to practice my ballet moves, as I did every day. My father watched as I demonstrated pirouettes for the doll.

* * *

I was not bullied for the doll. Every school in America showed their students Free to Be ... You and Me, accompanied by role-playing sessions and breakout discussion groups and other pedagogic techniques designed to stimulate young minds into thinking about complex issues. So when I would come to school with my doll, the other students thought it might be a plot by the educational staff to prompt another discussion of the television show, and they weren't about to fall for that trick.

I was occasionally bullied for my skills at patty cake and other rhyming games. I had an astonishing memory for the games' many rhymes and complex syncopated handclaps. Along with the girls in my class, I would often play Mary Mack and Miss Suzie and Stella Ella Ola, and I did not notice the other boys watching with disgust. One boy, a dirty, brutish child named Danny Jeffers , would sometimes shove me in the hall and kick the back of my chair. I ignored this as best as I could, but, if I was especially peeved, I would complain to my doll. "That Danny Jeffers," I would say. "He's a very mean boy and I don't like him."

Then I would find Karen English to play "Pretty Little Dutch Girl" with me, and I would forget about Danny Jeffers.

One day, Danny Jeffers caught me playing hopscotch in the school playground, and he threw my to the ground and kicked me quite a few times. The school suspended him and called my parents to pick me up. My father was the only one home at the time, as my mother had a consciousness raising session with her women's group every Wednesday, and he glumly walked to the grade school, which was just a few blocks from our house.

He spoke with my teachers for a while, and then he came into the school nurse's office, where I was posing in the nurse's white cloth cap. He sat down opposite me and watched me in silence for a while. Then he took my hand and walked me home.

On the way home, he asked me how I liked baseball. I told him I didn't know what baseball was. He sighed heavily and we walked the rest of the way home in silence.

That night, he came into my room to tuck me in to bed and kiss me good night, and he brought a gift with him. It was a Swiss Army knife. He told me he got it when he was a Boy Scout in Brownsville, and was going to give it to me when I was 10, but if I promised I would be very careful with it, I could have it now. He told me he would teach me to whittle and play mumblety peg, and maybe later in the summer we could go camping and he would show me how to start a fire without any matches.

The next day, he found me using the knife to cut out paper clothes for a dress-up paper doll. He went to find my mother, who was transferring a Wandering Jew plant into a rattan planter.

She shrugged non-commitally at his questions and told him the paper dolls were hers, from when she was a little girl, and I must have found them on my own. She didn't see what the big deal was.

* * *

When Danny Jeffers came back to school, at the end of his two-week suspension, the first thing he saw was me wearing a pink tutu. The school principal, a dour woman named Miss Irene Smelt, had told Danny Jeffers that the only way he would be allowed to come back to class was if he apologized to me when he returned. She made it clear that it was to be the very first thing he did.

Danny Jeffers marched over to me.

"What are you wearing?" he asked.

"A tutu," I said.

"I'm sorry I kicked you," Danny Jeffers said.

Then he punched my in the face.

This time, both my mother and my father came to get me at the school. The first thing my mother saw was my fat lip. The first thing my father saw was the tutu. She cried and stroked my hair, while my father knelt in front of me, brows furrowed, and peppered me with questions.

Of course, I had gotten the tutu from my mother. It had been hers when she was a little girl.

"I didn't think he'd wear it to school," my mother protested. "But you know how much he likes ballet."

That afternoon, my father brought home a baseball and a mitt, and took me in the backyard to show me how to play catch. He was relieved that I seemed to enjoy it, even if I wouldn't take off my tutu to do so.

* * *

My mother didn't know where I found the wig. It wasn't hers, and she resented my father claiming that she had given it to me. "Honestly," she said. "You behave like I am trying to make him into a little girl! All I am trying to do is let him know that it is okay not to be a slave to gender stereotypes."

My father had seen me in the bathtub, playing with a rubber duckie and wearing a wig of blond curls. He had gone to my mother first, but now he came to me, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and staring at the wall, unable to look at his son.

"Uh, listen, Bunny," he began gingerly. "Whose wig is that?"

"Mrs. Kerschbaum's, I think," I said. "She was throwing it out."

My father nodded, rose, and left the bathroom. I heard him digging through my belongings. Then, after a while, he came back into the bathroom.

"Hey, sport," he said. "I thought we might play some catch tonight, but I can't find your mitt or ball."

"Traded it," I said.

"Traded it for what?" he asked.

"An Easy Bake Oven," I said.

My father nodded. Then he rose and left the room.

* * *

My mother was not happy when my father brought home the BB gun. They had agreed that there would be no toy guns in the house.

"Honestly, I don't like them," she said. "I don't want Bunny thinking guns are a toy."

"I'll teach him to be responsible with it," my father said. "We'll have very strict rules. He is not to use it to play cops and robbers. He is only to use it to shoot targets. I read a study that says these sort of things can help a child develop their fine motor skills."

My mother continued to protest, but my father was adamant. He took me out in the back yard and set a series of empty cans on the picnic table there. Then he showed me how to aim at them. He was quite pleased when I proved to be something of a natural, picking off cans from 20 feet. "Very good, Bunny!" he said. "You're a little deadeye!"

He made me promise not to trade the BB gun, and then he read a story to me as I lay in bed. It was a chapter from a Hardy Boys book, and he told me how much he liked the book when he was my age. Then he tucked me in and kissed me goodnight.

When he came home from work the next day, he was thrilled to see me shooting can in the backyard. He came out to say hello to me, and noticed that I had painted my gun. It was now pink and covered with bright yellow flowers.

* * *

The child psychologist's name was Dr. Alvin Grey, and he worked in the Child Development Department at the University of Minnesota, which is how my father knew him. When my father broached the idea of bringing me to speak to Dr. Alvin, my mother got very upset and made him sleep on the couch for a few nights, but eventually he convinced her that he wasn't trying to change me, but that, instead, Dr. Alvin might help them understand me better.

I met with Dr. Alvin for three weeks, three sessions total, talking with him for an hour at a time, and then he went to speak to my father.

"Well, he knows he's a little boy," Dr. Alvin told my father.

"Then why does he act like a little girl," my father asked.

"He just seems to like the stuff little girls like," Dr. Alvin said, shrugging.

My father sat in silence, shaking his head.

"I know what you're worried about," Dr. Alvin said. "I think it's premature. This might just be a phase. He's a very little boy, and sometimes little boys have a funny way of seeing things. My little boy likes to wear plaid. Everything he wears is plaid. Nothing matches. But he won't stand to hear anybody tell him that he's wearing too much plaid."

"Bunny doesn't wear plaid," my father said. "He wears tiaras."

"Dr. Sparber, let me be clear," Dr. Alvin said. "There is no established connection between childhood behavior like Bunny exhibits and homosexuality."

"No?" my father asked.

"No," Dr. Alvin said. "But I should also say that psychology has come a long way in how it sees homosexuality. We used to think it was a mental illness, you know. Now we just consider it a normal part of the continuum of human sexuality."

"But you just told me there is no evidence Bunny is gay," my father said.

"That's true," Dr. Alvin said. "But there is also no evidence he isn't."

My father chewed on his pipe.

"Anyway," Dr. Alvin said, "it's going to be a long time until you have to worry about that. I suggest you just think of Bunny as a little boy who has a funny way of seeing the world. In his own way, he isn't that much different than little boys who eat worms, or little boys who are obsessed with dinosaurs."

"It doesn't feel the same," my father said.

"Well, what can you do?" Dr. Alvin said. "You can feel bad about him, or you can try to understand him."

* * *

The next day, a Saturday, my father came into my room and asked me if I wanted to do anything. I said I would, and asked him what. He asked me to suggest something.

We spent several hours playing Mystery Date and then drew pictures of unicorns for a while.

At almost 2pm, my mother came in to remind me that our favorite show was about to come on, a rebroadcast of the television show Police Woman with Angie Dickinson. I asked my father if he wanted to watch it with me.

He looked at me for a while without answering, chewing his pipe.

"Bunny, I want you to know something," he said. "I want you to know that whatever you do with your life, as long as you are happy, and you do it the best you can do it, I will always be your father, and I will always love you, and I will always be proud of you."

Tears flowed down his cheeks. I stared at him in astonishment. Then I waggled my finger at him reproachfully.

"You shouldn't cry," I told him. "Only little girls cry."

Then I took my doll and went into the living room to watch Police Woman.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

MY SECOND DAY IN LOS ANGELES I lost a toe.

It was my pinkie toe on my left foot. I got it caught in the shower drain at the YMCA, where I was staying. It came off easily, before I even noticed, like a grape comes out of a bunch. It didn't even really hurt, and didn't bleed much. I tried to recover the toe, perhaps thinking that it could be sewed back on, but by then it had gone wherever shower drains go.

I tried to put it behind me. I had a lot to do, after all. I was new in town, and very young, and nearly broke. It was petty theft that had gotten me to Los Angeles, as I had robbed my own parents' house for small valuables to finance the trip. I came away with a few old cameras, a VCR, and a silver flute. I pawned these, and it gave me just enough money for an airplane ticket and a week's rent at the Y. So I had to hustle, and I did not have time to worry about a lost toe. I dressed it, as best I could, with duct tape, and set out to find work.

I quickly found a job cooking french fries at a fast food restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. It wasn't much of a job, but it wasn't hard work, either. The restaurant was small and cheap and had barely passed its health inspections, and they scrimped where they could, reusing grease in the frier until it was thick and black and prone to catching fire. This was easily taken care of by throwing a metal sheet over the frier until the flame died from lack of oxygen, but there was never any warning when the grease was going to flare up and nasty burns were common. I lost my eyebrows. They just burned off one day, in an instant, and never grew back.

I spent most of my meager paycheck at movie theater. This was, after all, why I had moved to Los Angeles. I was a fan of the movies. I wanted to write for them, and I would stay up very late at night at the YMCA, typing out scripts on a portable typewriter that I had also stolen from my parents. I do not remember these scripts, although I remember them being brutal and often pornographic genre tales. They tended to end with everybody dying or everybody sleeping together, which is how I always felt stories should end. I wrote in a panicked rush and punctuated my dialogue with text written in all caps, a technique I had borrowed from comic books but which leaped off my typed pages like the ravings of a schizophrenic.

Before or after work, I would often wander by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce on Orange and Hollywood Boulevard. Every day they offered a photocopied list of movie shoots, including when and where they were to be filmed. I enjoyed watching films get made. I would buy a slice of pizza and sit on the curb and look at the trailer that the actors stayed in, and I would see the massive electrical generators that film crews lugged from place to place. I would watch the filmmakers set up lights, and mark off the ground with tape, and roll out huge cameras on cranes or build little railroad tracks for cameras on wheels. Every so often, an actor would come out of a trailer, say a sentence or two as the cameras rolled, and then go back into his trailer, whereupon the film crew would begin removing the cameras and taking down the lights to start the process over. I was fascinated by how much work was required to get a single line of dialogue.

This is how I lost my left hand. Everything on the set is powered by electricity, which is run through huge black cables that run around the set like looping snakes, pasted to the ground with black or silver tape. People walk back and forth across this tape throughout the shoot, or they roll sound equipment across it, or props, or cameras on wheels, and, every so often, the cable breaks slightly and electrifies something it is touching. Sometimes a crew member or actor will lean up against an aluminum costume trunk, or grab something off a craft services table, or rest for a moment by leaning up against a light stand. Moments later, other crew members will smell something burning, and will grab wooden dowels to knock the crew member or actor down to the ground, to break the connection to whatever is electrocuting them. Film companies are insured against this, and spend a lot of money on that insurance, because this is something that just happens every so often, and all you can really do is be ready to rush somebody to Cedar's Sinai to get their electrical burns tended to. It can happen to anybody. It happens to directors. It happens to movie stars. Sometimes it happens to members of the public who have come by to watch a movie getting filmed. One night, it happened to me.

The doctors recommended amputation, and it sounded like a better choice than the alternative, which was to have a scorched, useless, withered appendage. It was not a painful operation, and the film company's insurance covered it, plus whatever time I needed to take off work. I wound up recovering for about six weeks, and spent a lot of it exploring Los Angeles. I had been in the city for several months and still felt that I barely knew the town, as I had spent almost all my time in Hollywood. I had not yet even seen the Pacific Ocean, and so one day I took the bus to the beach at Santa Monica. I wandered around near the pier, and then took off my shoes, rolled up my pants, and walked into the surf to cool off.

Of course, this is how I lost my leg.

Shark attacks are uncommon off the coast of Southern California, and they are rare in water that shallow, but neither is unheard of. Truthfully, I don't remember much between when I first out my feet into the Pacific Ocean and when I woke up in the hospital. Whatever happened I now remember as a dream, and a bad one. A dream of teeth.

On my second day at the hospital, I got a call from an agent. He had heard my story on the news, and had heard I was an aspiring screenwriter, and wanted to meet me when I was released. A sympathetic nurse recovered my typewriter, and the rest of my belonging, from the YMCA, and I began to write in earnest. I wrote three complete screenplays that I intended as dark satires. I don't remember them very well, except that all of them told of kind men who became trapped in unlikely circumstances, and their efforts to extricate themselves simply worsened things. I believe one man went to jail for jaywalking, where he was eventually knifed to death by a white power gang who mistook him for being an Eskimo.

When I was ready to be released from the hospital, I telephoned the agent and made an appointment to see him. On the way there, I was caught in a gang drive-by shooting, took a bullet to the face, and lost my eye.

Perhaps I should have returned to Minneapolis after that. In fact, I wouldn't leave Los Angeles for my home town for another two months, during which time I would lose my front teeth, an ear, part of my tongue, and my remaining kneecap. The day my kneecap came off, I burned all my scripts and called my parents to wire my a ticket back home. I did not seek medical help until I arrived in the Twin Cities, and the emergency room physician was astounded I had managed to travel with the condition my leg was in. I told him I could not stand another minute of Los Angeles.

My life now alternates between a quiet job I have as a librarian and physical therapy. There are other refugees from Los Angeles in my physical therapy program. One broke his back at the Hollywood Bowl dancing too vigorously to a hip hop band. One of my friends lost all his hair in Los Angeles after falling out of a palm tree; somehow, the fall scalped him. I am dating a young woman who was blinded by the too-bright flashbulbs of celebrity paparazzi when she stumbled onto a red carpet at the Chinese Theater. None of us miss Los Angeles, and we were all glad to get away.

I still dream of the city, as I did before I moved there. But my dreams then were hopeful ones. I would dream of driving a convertible in the Hollywood Hills with a young actress in the passenger seat. Or I would dream of drinking tropical drinks in hotel swimming pools. Or I would dream of strangers running up to me in the streets to beg my autograph. My dreams of Los Angeles are no longer like that. They are bad dreams.

They are dreams of teeth.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

FOUR PHOTOS from tonight's press conference with Al Franken, where he responded to the news that a three-judge panel has dismissed Norm Coleman's lawsuit challenging the results of the Senate election in Minnesota.

SAILOR MARTIN, as you can see, has busted his head.

One of my tasks in preparing to make the Sailor Martin movie was to address an issue I have had with him for several years. His mouth clacks and squeaks. I got out some WD-40 tonight and sprayed it around him in the hopes that this would help, and it did, mostly. But then Sailor Martin's head slipped out of my grip and hit the ground with a thump. When I lifted him again, I noticed his forehead had split and there were chunks missing.

This is not the first, or, I imagine, the last Sailor Martin has required patching up by me, and it is something I always worry about. For now, I have pieced most of him back together with Mod Podge, and tomorrow I will swing by a hardware store to get some fiberglass sealant to fill the gaps. But this has got me thinking.

At this moment, there is only one Sailor Martin in the world. Were something irreparable to happen to him, I would have to get a professional vent figure to make me a new one -- an expensive and time-consuming process. I use Sailor Martin for projects all the time, and so the likelihood of him getting damaged again is pretty high. Additionally, repairs are just that -- repairs. His head will always be weaker where it cracked, and will likely crack again, and again.

Furthermore, I am, at the moment, bound by some of the design decisions his original creator came up with, some of which I would like to do away with. For instance, Sailor Martin has a scarf glued around his head. I'd rather be done with it. With Martin, I have a puppet that was build six or seven years ago, but, as his personality has grown, the original design doesn't completely suit his character.

I've spent enough time looking at the mechanics of Martin to see that it is pretty straightforward. Also, the way he was made isn't that complicated. I would bet he was first sculpted out of clay, then the clay was made into a mold, and then the mold was filled with fiberglass.

I can do that.

It may be time for me to figure out how to make my own Sailor Martin. This would give me the chance to update the design, and, more importantly, to have several Martins on hand, in case of accident. After five or six years, I've had him around long enough, and used him in enough projects, that it's pretty obvious that he is going to be an ongoing character in my life. I'd rather have him be something I can modify and update as I need, and be something rugged and flexible, than be an expensive and fragile objet d'art that I must be terribly cautious with, which is what he is starting to be.

This accident tonight has me thinking that perhaps I should hold off on the Sailor Martin movie, which, after all, I could just as easily film here in Minneapolis as in Omaha, and concoct a different project for Omaha, until I can create some new Sailor Martins for myself. I mean, if I go to Omaha and Sailor Martin breaks, the filming is done.

Yes, I think that is what I will do. I shall think about what else I want to film over the course of this week, and then progress with that project. I would like to take this Martin, the original Martin, and set him aside somewhere where I can feel sure he will be safe. Because this is the original, he holds a special place in my heart, and I would feel just sick and terrible were anything to happen to him.

More Sailor Martin.

A STORY TOLD ON TWITTER

Bought a new hat. Don't know when I'll ever wear it. It's a leather stroker hat, with chains, like bikers wear.
1:04 PM Apr 9th from web

You know, what the hell. I'm going to wear my new hat tonight.
3:01 PM Apr 10th from web

Got my new hat on at the Los Straitjackets concert. Getting a lot of compliments!
10:07 PM Apr 10th from mobile web

Going out after the show with friends. I suggested The Cabooze as a joke, but now everybody wants to go.
11:50 PM Apr 10th from mobile web

Feel a little weird here. The only thing biker about me is my hat. There are real bikers here. Nice bar, though.
12:21 PM Apr 10th from mobile web

The bartender just complimented my hat! He asked if it makes me feel like a badass.
12:34 AM Apr 11th from mobile web

Home. Drunk. Just looked at myself in the mirror. The hat looks really good, but ridiculous with the rest of my clothes.
1:35 AM Apr 11th from web

Bought a used leather jacket at Tatters. $150, but it's awesome. Studded. So punk.
4:23 PM Apr 13th from web

Feel kind of bad I haven't worn my new leather jacket yet. Who wants to do something tonight.
4:23 PM Apr 17th from web

Mary is coming over. She's bringing booze. Open invitation, y'all.
4:24 PM Apr 17th from web

Wow! Seven people here! We're doing shots of tequila while figuring out what to do tonight.
5:42 PM Apr 17th from web

Cabooze it is. We can take the lightrail. Too much tequila to drive. Going to wear my jacket.
5:57 PM Apr 17th from web

Survey: Who thinks I should wear my hat too?
5:57 PM Apr 17th from web

At Cabooze. Things are getting crazy. Join us!
6:40 PM Apr 17th from mobile web

The bartender remembers me!
6:42 PM Apr 17th from mobile web

Oh, shit. AM GOING TO FEEL LIKE SHIT TOMORROW.
10:11 PM Apr 17th from mobile web

Hey, anybody remember the name of that girl I left with last night? I want to get in touch with her.
8:15 AM Apr 18th from web

@MaryLaLa. Montana? Are you serious? That's not a name, it's a state.
8:24 AM Apr 18th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa I don't want to tweet it publicly. DM me.
8:25 AM Apr 18th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Ran into the bartender from The Cabooze at Grumpys. We talked for a while. Nice guy. He says next time I'm at The Cabooze, he'll hook me up.
5:12 PM Apr 21st from mobile web

@Caboozebar just started following me!
5:45 PM Apr 21st from mobile web

My boss just mentioned she noticed I have been wearing my leather jacket a lot. She says it looks good on me.
1:23 PM Apr 23rd from web

Just got Hell Ride from Netflix. I'm embarrassed to say it, but this movie is awesome.
7:42 PM Apr 25th from web

@MaryLaLa No I am not turning into a biker.
7:44 PM Apr 25th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Reading about Larry Bishop. Just put Angel Unchained into my Netflix queue.
9:05 PM Apr 25th from web

Decided to have a Larry Bishop film festival. Look on Facebook for the invite. Everybody must come dressed as a Hells Angel.
9:20 PM Apr 25th from web

@MaryLaLa. That's hilarious. Great suggestion! We're going to The Cabooze afterward.
9:22 PM Apr 25th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

What sort of food should I serve?
9:23 PM Apr 25th from web

Consensus seems to be barbecue, with plenty of alcohol.
9:38 PM Apr 25th from web

Just bought a case of Jack Daniels. I'm not kidding. A WHOLE CASE.
5:56 PM Apr 28th from mobile web

At Tatters. Buying some boots. Found a pair wrapped in chains. Also, a brass knuckles belt buckle.
6:32 PM Apr 28th from mobile web

Dammit. No Harley stuff. @MaryLaLa, do you want to go to the Harley store in Blaine?
6:57 PM Apr 28th from mobile web

Looking at harleys with @MaryLaLa. They're fucking amazing. Bought gloves and a bandanna.
5:12 PM Apr 29th from mobile web

Just decided I am not going to shave before Friday
6:45 AM Apr 30th from web

Just noticed I'm being followed by @harleydavidson!
6:46 AM Apr 30th from web

Jesus, I'm shaggy.
11:12 PM May 3rd from web

Remember, party tonight!
7:14 AM May 4th from web

Oops. Better go buy some meat. It's going to be hard to barbecue in the apartment, but I'll do my best!
5:01 PM May 4th from web

Guests arriving. They look great.
7:15 PM May 4th from web

Playing music. Davie Allen and the Arrows. Everybody is impressed.
7:31 PM May 4th from web

Shit. @DBUSY has an actual switchblade. I'm jealous!
7:25 PM May 4th from web

Everybody has meat and Jack Daniels. First movie started. The Savage Seven.
7:41 PM May 4th from web

Half the party went outside to smoke. I don't smoke, but I think I'll join them.
8:58 PM May 4th from web

Second movie: The Devil's 8.
9:15 PM May 4th from web

Wow. Already went through three bottles of Jack Daniels.
9:46 PM May 4th from web

THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME.
10:11 PM May 4th from web

Won't have time for Chrome and Hot Leather. Cabooze waits.
11:16 PM May 4th from web

Evening has gotten mellow, but amazing. Am playing horseshoes with some real Angels.
12:05 AM May 5th from mobile web

These guys are telling some mind-blowing stories.
12:21 AM May 5th from mobile web

Okay, that guy knows some amazing tricks with a switchblade.
12:48 AM May 5th from mobile web

Bar is closing. Got invited back to a clubhouse in North Minneapolis.
1:05 AM May 5th from mobile web

Just said my goodbyes to my friends. EXCELLENT PARTY, Y'ALL. Now, to the clubhouse.
1:08 AM May 5th from mobile web

Just rode my first Harley. WANT ONE.
1:43 AM May 5th from mobile web

Am showing off Twitter on my iPhone.
1:59 AM May 5th from mobile web

Turning off iPhone now.
2:00 AM May 5th from mobile web

Jesus. Never been so hungover in my life. Thank God it's Saturday.
1:46 PM May 6th from web

@MaryLaLa DM me. Can't talk about it on Twitter.
1:48 PM May 6th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@harleylord Hey, man, welcome to Twitter.
6:15 PM May 6th from web in reply to harleylord

@jackalMN All right, dude. Good to see you.
7:19 PM May 6th from web in reply to jackalMN

@knifegutter I see you just tweeted from iPhone. Got one too, huh. EXCELLENT.
9:51 PM May 6th from web in reply to knifegutter

@montanabitch Hey! I know you!
11:35 PM May 6th from web in reply to montanabitch

FOLLOWFRIDAY @MPLSgunking @apachered @fatmanmiller @MN-harleyclub @roadrage68
7:15 AM May 12th from web

Just ordered a switchblade from the Interwebs. Not strictly legal, so shhhh.
6:12 AM May 13th from web

@MaryLaLa Come on. I'm just having fun.
6:12 AM May 13th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Found a book of biker fiction from Easyriders magazine at the thrift store. Twenty-five cents.
4:18 PM May 15th from mobile web

Holy fuck. These stories are crazy.
1:55 AM May 16th from mobile web

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
8:22 AM May 16th from foursquare

@montanabitch What you doing tonight?
11:04 PM May 17th from web

@montanabitch I have a lot of Jack Daniels left over and still haven't watched Shanks.
11:05 PM May 17th from web in reply to montanabitch

@MaryLaLa. That's not very nice.
11:07 PM May 17th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
9:12 PM May 18th from foursquare

FOLLOW FRIDAY: @6yearsinthepen @scarmaker @bleedingtoughboy @jackdaniels @fresnophil
8:14 AM May 21st from web

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
10:03 PM May 21st from foursquare

Decided to get my first tattoo, gang. At shop with @montanabitch, lookign at flash.
11:01 AM May 22nd from foursqure

HA! Jesus Christ, that hurt like a motherfucker. @montanabitch, take my pain away!
5:57 PM May 22nd from web

Can't stop looking at my tattoo. Flying eyeball on upper right arm. TOTALLY CLASSIC.
9:18 PM May 22nd from web

@MaryLaLa. Seriously. There is nothing to worry about.
9:19 PM May 22nd from web in reply to MaryLaLa

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
11:25 PM May 22nd from foursquare

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
5:18 PM May 27th from foursquare

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
4:35 PM May 31st from foursquare

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
11:00 AM June 3rd from foursquare

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
8:00 PM June 8th from foursquare

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
6:25 PM June 15th from foursquare

Got fired. It's the beard. Fuck it. Fuck them. I told them I wasn't going to shave it.
3:15 PM June 21st from web

@roachgod says he knows where I can pick up some money.
4:18 PM June 21st from web

@MaryLaLa NO, it's nothing illegal. Jesus Christ. I'm going to repo cars.
4:19 PM June 21st from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Switchblade arrived. I can't stop playing with it.
11:18 AM June 30th from web

@doctorsmooth 16 stitches. But, fuck it, man. Chicks dig scars.
6:18 PM June 30th from mobile web in reply to doctorsmooth

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
6:38 PM July 2nd from foursquare

Some crazy shit is going down at Broadway 8 Ball tonight.
1:08 AM July 3rd from mobile web

Just saw a guy hit with a pool cue. That was intense.
1:13 AM July 3rd from mobile web

@MaryLaLa I'm okay. Just a witness. Well, mostly.
1:18 AM July 3rd from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

Cops here.
1:22 AM July 3rd from mobile web

FOLLOW FRIDAY @freedomlawctr
2:18 PM July 3rd from web

Repo'ed my first car today. Guy took one look at me and @roachgod and handed the keys over.
4:56 PM July 9th from web

@montanabitch I'm looking at the photos you just emailed and am missing you.
8:18 PM July 13th from web

@montanabitch missing that too! HA!!
8:19 PM July 13th from web in reply to montanabitch

@legbreakerbill is going to teach me to ride. FINALLY.
12:18 PM July 19th from mobile web

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
5:18 PM July 20th from foursquare

At the Lamplighter Lounge, 160 Larpenteur Ave W, St Paul.
11:35 PM July 20th from foursquare

Repo'ed a car from a 22-year-old in Eagan. He showed some attitude. We took the car anyway.
3:54 PM July 22nd from mobile web

Noise complaint. Cops showed up to tell me to lower my music. Third time this week. Fucking neighbors.
1:04 AM July 23rd from web

Think I'm getting the hang of riding this hog. It has apehangers, so it's harder than most.
6:13 PM July 25th from mobile web

Repo'ed a truck from a Mexican. He had three brothers and a shotgun. Now he has a hospital bill.
5:43 PM July 29th from mobile web

@MaryLaLa No I didn't, but if you pull heat on @legbreakerbil, there are repercussions.
5:48 PM July 29th from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

Just looked in a mirror. The weight-lifting is starting to show. Looking good!
11:15 AM Aug 13th from web

@montanabitch Thanks! You talk to your cousin Lucy about that thing?
11:24 AM Aug 13th from web in reply to montanabitch

@montanabitch Awesome. You just get her to the party, I'll make sure we got the booze and other supplies.
11:25 AM Aug 13th from web in reply to montanabitch

@MaryLaLa Oh, come on. We're all adults here.
11:26 AM Aug 13th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Passed my motorcycle test. Am now street legal. Getting a tattoo to celebrate.
3:19 PM Aug 28th from mobile web

"Born to ride." Fucking excellent.
6:18 PM Aug 28th from mobile web

At the Cabooze. 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
9:18 PM Sep 2nd from foursquare

At the 22nd Avenue Station, 2121 University Ave NE
11:12 PM Sep 2nd from foursquare

Pricing Harleys with @legbreakerbill. Jesus, how does anybody afford these?
4:12 PM Sep 8th from mobile web

Never mind. @legbreakerbill has some suggestions.
4:13 PM Sep 8th from mobile web

Repo'ed a car in Ramsey. Cops stopped us and hassled us. We're fucking licensed, man.
7:04 PM Sep 16th from mobile web

At the Cabooze, 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
9:12 PM Sep 18th from foursquare

At Gentleman's Choice, 254 2nd Ave N, Minneapolis
11:45 PM Sep 18th from foursquare

@MaryLaLa Yeah that's a strip club. Why? You wanna come?
11:46 PM Sep 18th from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa @montanabitch thinks you look like you know how to "party."
11:47 PM Sep 18th from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa All right. Forget I said it.
11:48 PM Sep 18th from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

Don't remember chipping my tooth last night. Don't remember much of anything.
11:14 AM Sep 20th from web

@jimmytheknife Really? No fucking way! Well, as long as I held up my end.
11:18 AM Sep 20th from web in reply to jimmytheknife

@MaryLaLa DM me. Can't talk about it.
11:19 AM Sep 10th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

At the dentist. Going to see if I can get a gold tooth cover.
1:04 PM Sep 11th from mobile web

All right, that looks fucking ace.
3:04 PM Sep 11th from mobile web

At the Cabooze, 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis.
11:09 AM Sep 13th from foursquare

At Bill's Gun Shop and Range, 4080 W Broadway Ave # 1, Robbinsdale
4:04 PM Sep 13th from foursquare

Just bought a handgun. Snob nose revolver. I can barely hold it, let alone shoot it.
6:02 PM Sep 13th from mobile web

@MaryLaLa No! Just for target shooting. You should come some time. It's righteous.
6:09 PM Sep 13th from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa All right. Don't then.
6:10 PM Sep 13th from mobile web in reply to MaryLaLa

At the Cabooze, 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis
4:18 PM Sep 20th from foursquare

At Sexworld, 241 2nd Ave N, Minneapolis
2:04 AM Sep 21st from foursquare

My lungs feel like shit.
1:08 PM Sep 22nd from web

@MaryLaLa About three months now. I thought you knew I smoke.
1:13 PM Sep 22nd from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa Fuck off. You're not my mom.
1:14 PM Sep 22nd from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Unfollowing @MNHawksClub. Recommend others do likewise.
12:03 AM Sep 29th from mobile web

@jimmytheknife DM me and I'll tell you everything.
12:15 AM Sep 29th from mobile web in reply to jimmytheknife

At Hennepin Country Medical Center, 701 Park Avenue, Minneapolis
12:35 AM Sep 29th from foursquare

@montanabitch Just talked to the doctor. Your brother is going to pull through.
3:18 AM Sep 29th from mobile web in reply to montanabitch

@jimmytheknife I'm okay. Got slashed a few times, hit with a belt buckle.
3:23 AM Sep 29th from mobile web in reply to jimmytheknife

@jimmytheknife Fucking A. I'm in.
3:24 AM Sep 29th from mobile web in reply to jimmytheknife

At the Cabooze, 917 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis
8:23 PM Sep 29th from foursquare

Turning off my iPhone now.
9:05 PM Sept 29th from mobile web

@MaryLaLa Sorry I haven't responded to your DMs. Had to lay low for a while.
11:08 AM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa Yeah, I did buy a Harley. Didn't I tell you?
11:10 AM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa Dunno when I can show it to you. Maybe never. It was seized as evidence. Officially, it's not mine.
11:11 AM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa Sure. Come on over.
11:12 AM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Had a nice afternoon with @MaryLaLa. Good to catch up with old friends.
6:08 PM Oct 15th from web

You know what really helps? Being able to talk to someone you know is really your pal, no bullshit.
6:09 PM Oct 15th from web

@MaryLaLa No, me and @montanabitch are done. It just got too complicated.
6:18 PM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa. Thanks. That means a lot.
6:19 PM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

@MaryLaLa Oh my God. I just found what you left me. Hilarious. Don't know when I'll ever wear it, though.
11:18 PM Oct 15th from web in reply to MaryLaLa

Looking in mirror at hat left by @MaryLaLa. Actually, it looks good on me.
11:25 PM Oct 15th from web

Trying to think of when I can wear this bowler derby.
1:04 PM October 16th from web

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE HOTTEST THING I EVER ATE.

It's the hottest pepper on earth. It grows in very small amounts in the Amazon basin, and the natives who live in the region have no word for it in their language; their word for the plant and their word for death is identical. Every so often, a member of their tribe will brush against it by accident in the forest and burst into flames.

When this happens, the unfortunate tribesman's ashes are mixed into a paste and then ceremonially eaten. Obviously, this is the only way you can eat the death pepper. The pepper itself has never been tested for how hot it is, but the ashes of someone who has touched them come in at a whopping 30 million Scoville units; by comparison, a habanero pepper, the hottest commercially available chili, is about 200,000 Scoville units.

It's extraordinarily rare to be invited to participate in the death pepper ceremony. To the best of my knowledge, only two non-natives have ever done so. The first was Sir Robert Blythe-Green in 1909; he left a handwritten account of the ceremony the day he took his own life. There is Margaret Whitechapel, who, of course, when mad from the experience in 1927. And there is me.

I was in the Amazon in the late 80s doing some ethnopharmacological work. I had become friendly with a small and unusually prankish tribe, and they had already given me a number of plants to eat, just to see how I would react. They found my reaction to the Panther Flower particularly amusing, although I am not sure the ferry pilot I mauled appreciated the humor. And so, when a teenage boy accidentally touched an death pepper and exploded, they decided to ask me to join the ceremony.

The tribespeople set aside three days for the ceremony, and hide anything sharp or anything that might be used as a weapon. The actual eating of the ashes takes only a few minutes, and is done with surprisingly little ceremony. I suppose none is really needed. When you're about to eat the ashes of someone who has died from the death pepper, any introductory ceremony is just busy work.

I watched three or four of the tribesmen eat the paste before they passed it on to me. I don't know what I was expecting, but I knew it wasn't going to be like anything I had ever tried before. The man who passed me the paste was grinning, but his eyes were stained red from blood vessels inside them bursting. This doesn't happen to everybody. I don't know if it happened to me.

I've had peppers before. I ate a bhut jolokia chili years ago, when I was in India, and it was about the hottest thing I had ever had up until that point; it a Scoville rating of about 1 million units. I was really afraid I might die from it, and my tongue felt scorched for days afterward.

Well, the death pepper is so far beyond even the experience of eating a bhut jolokia chili that your brain is not even capable of registering it as pain. Instead, you simply assume you have gone mad. There is a very distinct sense that you may actually have lost your mouth, you nose, and throat; one imagines oneself rather grotesquely, as a humanlike thing who has had these body parts torn away. Balance is generally impossible, but the experience is so enormous that you can't stop moving. The natives call it the crawling trance, because tribesman have been found as far as seven miles away, having squirmed the entire distance while under the spell of the death pepper. Some, of course, try to kill themselves, which is why anything that might be use as a weapon is hidden. Some succeed anyway, by drowning themselves or throwing themselves off cliffs. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough that you take precautions, and be ready for the possibility that someone might be dead at the end of the experience.

There is a lot of hallucinating. A lot. And the hallucinations are beyond nightmarish. The natives like to say "There is no wisdom in the pepper," and they're right. Some hallucinogens will give the user the distinct feeling that they have journeyed, and learned something. What you see on the death pepper you wish you didn't, and try to forget, and never speak of. I won't describe my hallucinations. I am not sure I can. They have an extra-dimensional quality that defies language, as though the edges of the world were just so much putrid, rotting flesh, and there is something outside it chewing its way in. That's about the best I can describe the experience, and I'd rather not think about it anymore.

I cried for a full year after I ate the death pepper. I don't mean that my eyes watered. I mean that I regularly burst into long fits of anguished weeping. Weirdly, this behavior seemed like it was just a reflex to me. I wasn't actually feeling some psychic torment, and I watched myself sobbing with embarrassed curiosity. It could happen anytime, and there seemed to be no reason for it. It could have been worse, though. A percentage of those who eat the pepper lose their sense of smell. Some lose their ability to see. There's nothing physically wrong with them, mind you -- their eyes work, and their optic nerve is fine. It's as though the pepper simply burned away their ability to register what they saw.

And, of course, some, like Margaret Whitechapel, never regain their sanity. I don't know what her madness was like. If it was the gibbering horror of my hallucinations, I don't know how she could stand it, although I understand she was frequently restrained. They say when she died, she was unable to speak or make any noise, as she had screamed so much and so loudly that she had destroyed her vocal chords.

It's marked me. I feel like I just walk through the world, unconcerned about anything, like a living ghost. A few years ago my doctors were worried I might have a cancerous tumor on my neck, and had me tested. It proved to be benign and they removed it. Afterward, one of the doctors, a kind man named Erhardt, confessed to me he had never seen anybody like me. He said that I barely seemed to register the new when he first told me of the possibility of cancer, and that I behaved toward the tests and the surgery with the same vague disinterest of someone waiting for a bus. And it was true. The whole thing barely registered to me. It was more like a dull chore to me than a potentially life-threatening diagnosis. My whole life is like that.

The worst part is, I want to go back to the Amazon and to eat the ash of the pepper dead again. It's the last time I remember really feeling anything. I suppose that's why the Amazonians keep doing it, whenever somebody in their tribe accidentally touches the plant. They're gentle people with a good sense of humor, but I suspect, like me, their lives are mostly seen as being the lull between when they last had the pepper and when they will have it again.

I might go back to the Amazon next year, but the truth is, I am a little afraid to do so. I have started to wonder if anybody really ever does accidentally brush against the death pepper. It's not like it is a plant that you might not notice, because it might be found buried in a mass of other local flora. No, the death pepper grows on its own in a patch of scorched earth, and nothing living can be found within a 20 foot circle of the plant. Additionally, the air around it seems to shimmer, like the air above an oven or a volcano.

I have been thinking about that pepper a lot. Because if eating the ashes of someone who has touched it is so powerful, what must the experience of touching it be like?

When the Amazon tribesmen say that there is no wisdom in the pepper, maybe they aren't talking about the experience of eating the ash. Maybe it is a warning against touching the plant itself. Maybe they are warning that it is just death, which is, after all, their word for the plant. Maybe there is no experience at all. You're a living person one moment, and the next, upon touching the pepper, you are ash, and there was no experience between the first state of being and the second.

I can't help but wonder, though. And that's why I fear going back to the Amazon. Because, in the ghostly half-world I live in, where every experience comes to me like a muffled sound, and where I respond to it all with a shrug, thinking about touching the flower is something different, and something I crave.

It's exciting.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

FINDING OUT that I am a caveman actually makes a lot of sense.

It was a bit of a surprise at first. On a whim, I participated in one of those DNA programs that Universities sponsor every now and then. You register online, they send you a packet in the mail, you use a Q-Tip to swab your mouth and then send the Q-Tip back. They use your DNA for whatever project they are working on -- in this instance, it was a study of the various ethnicities of Minnesota. They also send you your results, and you can use your DNA fingerprint for tracking your family tree. There's always a few surprises, such as discovering that you share DNA with Thomas Jefferson, or that your family, which has always identified as French, has a large amount of Native American DNA.

I found out I was a caveman.

I probably shouldn't be so simplistic. "Caveman" is a pretty useless phrase, mostly used to label a cartoon of man's prehistoric ancestors, and describes, say, Fred Flintstone or Alley Oop better than it does any creature that ever lived. So, to be specific, a few weeks after I sent in my DNA swab, I got a call from Dr. Lisa Frank of the University of Minnesota, saying that there may have been a mistake in my test, and would I mind coming in to the University to retake the test. I asked her what the mistake might have been. At first, she was vague and evasive, but eventually sighed and told me that my test results were inconsistent with the DNA test results of modern humans.

Specifically, she told me I had the DNA of a Cro-Magnon. In fact, it was the DNA of Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor of the Neanderthal who are thought to have developed about 600,000 years ago, and were supposed to have gone extinct 400,000 years ago. Of course, she hastened to add, this was undoubtedly a flaw in the test, and not because I was, in fact, a caveman.

She was wrong.

With the DNA tests confirmed, I found myself the subject of all sorts of studies, which I agreed to, because I was curious myself. They asked about my family history, but there wasn't much I could tell them. My parents died in a rather strange accident when I was a little boy. They apparently wandered into the polar bear exhibit at the Como Zoo and were mauled to death, although some witness report them either defending themselves or actually attacking the bears with sharpened sticks. I was raised in foster homes, and the subject of my parents, or anything else about my family tree, was rarely broached.

I was given an IQ test, and did fairly well -- exceptionally high on spacial perception, in fact, and about average on everything else, although they did note that I tended to break abstract concepts down to a few categories, those being "fire," "clan," "food," stick," "mate," "stuff to bury," and "devil bear." On my end, I was surprised to discover that not everybody sees things this way, because, if you think about it, almost everything can be put into one of those categories.

I was a mystery, and scientists love a mystery, so grants were written, and I was asked if I could leave my job for six months to participate in additional studies. Of course I could leave my job. I work as a caricaturist at the Mall of America. I can always get that job back. Additionally, I have been having some difficulties at work, as I tended to illustrate my subjects standing in front of bisons or surrounded by tracings of my hand, which annoyed my employers. I couldn't explain why. I just like bisons and tracings of my hand. Now it sort of makes sense.

It didn't take long for the researchers to track down a possible explanation. They discovered a very diary in the basement of Walter Library detailing a purchase made by the University of Minnesota in 1872. It seems a body was found encased in ice in Sandur and the Faroe Islands. The body was found all the way back in 1812 and was out on display, still encased in case, in a Scottish carnival. The carnival went bankrupt, having lost its audience to rugby, which was then starting to gain an international following, and, as it happened, a fellow named Newton Horace Winchell was on vacation in Scotland at the time. Winchell had just taken over as head of the newly formed Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey. Out of curiosity, Winchell attended an auction, and there he saw the ice-encased body. He examined it, as best he could, and discovered it to be a fairly primitive-looking woman in sealskin. Her body was perfectly preserved and, from what he was able to determine, looked pregnant.

Winchell assumed that the woman was a viking settler to the Faroe Islands, but he was charmed by the oddity and, as he was the only bidder, managed to buy the body for very little money. He kept it in ice, thanks to advances in refrigerated shipping, sending his discovery home via a circuitous route on the ship Marlborough, one of the first commercial ships to be outfitted with a refrigeration unit. The ship hailed from New Zealand and delivered agricultural exports to South America and the United Kingdom. And so Winchell loaded his purchase onto the Marlborough at Port Glasgow, where it was packed in with 4331 mutton, 598 lamb and 22 pig carcasses, 246 kegs of butter, as well as hare, pheasant, turkey, chicken and 2226 sheep tongues. Six months later, it arrived at the University of Minnesota, having been to England, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina, where it deboated, and then was sent north via refrigerated rail car. Winchell kept the woman's body in a walk in meat locker near his office in Pillsbury Hall. He often brought guests in to see it, and wrote the story of how he found it in his diary, which is the one discovered in the basement of Walter Library.

But what became of the woman in the ice after May 3 of 1914, when Winchell died? Researches scoured the University newspapers for clues, and here's what they turned up: Nobody really knew what to do with the woman in ice after Winchell's death. It was kept at the Bell Museum of Natural history until 1945, when a squirrel caused a massive power outage at the University of Minnesota. The University scrambled to save their perishables, loading them up onto refrigerated trucks, and drove them around the city until the power could be restored. Somehow, in the chaos, Winchell's ice woman disappeared. Perhaps someone forgot to load it. Perhaps a truck driver stole it, although that seems unlikely. Perhaps it got dumped, somehow. Whatever happened, the ice woman disappeared, and here is where fact ends and theory begins.

The researchers believe that Winchell's ice woman was not a viking settler at all, but a Homo heidelbergensis who had somehow managed to find her way to the Faroe Islands and froze there. And, in a plot twist that has fueled hundreds of terrible films, they believe she may have been frozen alive, and returned to consciousness after the blackout of 1945, long enough, at least, to give birth to the child, or children, she had been pregnant with, who somehow, improbably, survived.

There is little known about my parents, but what is known seems to confirm this theory. They were raised in the Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children, an orphanage in Owatanna. I never knew this, of course; I barely knew my parents. But researchers from the University scoured public records for information about my parents. I did not ask, and they did not tell me, but I have to assume if I am a full-blooded Homo heidelbergensis, my parents must have been brother and sister. Twins, in fact. I prefer not to think about it. There is a marriage certificate listing his name as Michael Sparber and her name as Jessica Underhill, but no indication of how they got those names. And then, of course, the Como Zoo and the tragedy, which is well documented in the press of the time.

I don't know what to tell you about this. It's a hell of a thing to find out at age 40, and I have a lot of time to think about it, as my days are mostly spend having my head measured, and doing various tests of my bodily strength and running speed and biting strength. There isn't much for me to do otherwise. I receive a small stipend from the University for my time, and they put me up in a dorm room, and so sometimes I go to free movies offered by the student center, or playing a duck hunting video game at the basement of Coffman Union, or take the bus out to the St. Paul campus to look at the bison at the Agricultural School. Sometimes, I just walk along the Mississippi and sometimes try to catch fish with my bare hands. But mostly I think about things. I think about my life.

I have never been able to balance a checkbook. I've always been embarrassed about the fact. When I was much younger, I got in quite a bit of trouble, as I tended to write more checks than I had money for. There were years when I didn't even have a checking account, preferring to pay for things with cash or with money orders. It was simpler. I knew when I was out of money, because the cash ran out. I have a checkbook now, but only use it to pay rent, and, even then, usually try not to spend my money for a few days, until the check clears.

I've had a hard time keeping down a job. I work reasonably well, but I am restless and tend to quit jobs after a year. I've held down a lot of meaningless jobs: data entry; delivering paper; stocking shelves at an office supply store. None of it satisfied me, and so I'd move on after a while. This job drawing caricatures is as close to happy as I have ever been at a job, and it didn't take much for me to quit the job to become a professional Guinea pig for scientists. And I never felt very good about that. As a 40-year-old, I should have a career. I should have found a job that means something to me. But I haven't.

My life is a series of little failings like this. I've never managed to stay in a relationship for more than a few months. I had a drivers license, very briefly, about three years ago, but never drive and let it expire. I've never owned a house. I begin to read a book and get distracted and forget to get back to it. I'm short-tempered and quite abrupt with other people, and so have a hard time making friends, or maintaining friendships. And I knew this made me a sort of a pathetic character, but I just didn't seem to be capable of anything more than I had managed.

I think I'm okay with that now. It's already a hard enough life if you're a normal person. I know quite a few people who have lost their licenses, or had trouble with finances, or were hard to get along with. Imagine how much harder it has been for me.

After all, I'm a caveman.

I suspect I can remain at the University for quite a while. There will always be more grants that can be written to study me. I figure my grandmother lived her at the University, encased in a block of ice, for 73 years. I can probably manage to stay here for the rest of my life, with scientists taking blood samples and seeing how I react to different diets and testing my memory and my vision and my hearing. I have something to offer them that nobody else on earth has to offer.

I may not be much of a man, but I think I can be one hell of a caveman.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I'VE FINALLY gotten back to the point where I can close the trainer model of the Captains of Crush gripper. Or, I should say, I briefly got there, because getting up to that point meant exercising my hand to such a level of soreness and fatigue that when I attempted even to squeeze my gripper yesterday, I was powerless. Will take the day off today to give my hands the chance to recover.

I also placed an order for a Number 1 gripper. The Captains of Crush program recommends using three grippers in your program. One which you can close quite easily for warmups, one which you can close with some effort for your regular workouts, and one which you can't close at all to push you a little further. I'm looking forward to being able to close the trainer model with relative ease because, honestly, I'm a little embarrassed that it's been such hard work to get it to close, and that it has taken so long, and been such effort, to get my hands up to even this level. I did not expect to discover that I have a relatively weak grip. Sometimes I hand people the trainer model and they close it with ease, and they haven't spent two weeks with the thing, wrestling it closed. Boo.

In the meanwhile, I have been reading web pages on grip strength, and many of them are hilarious, mostly because they all sound like they were written by Rex Kwon Do, the gruff-voiced neighborhood sensei from Napoleon Dynamite. Not only are most of these written in a sort of testosterone-fueled frenzy, but they tend to identify strength as being gendered -- that is to say, the constantly identify strength as being something a man has. I don't think they really mean anything by it -- after all, they're not explicitly saying that weakness is therefore female, and, perhaps in their mind, they are contrasting the strength of a man with the weakness of a boy, or something else that is not a man, like a swizzle stick. But it's still odd to read, as though the burly stereotypes of 1950s gym instructors had be given Web pages.

There is this one, as an example, which discusses the development of the author's grip when he "ditched [his] strict bodybuilding regime and made the transition to 'Underground' training."

Weak Hands = Weak Man, the author informs us: "The 50 year old construction worker who shakes your hand and practically smashes every bone in your hand has that REAL Man grip strength!"

This site, which sells DVDs with titles like How to Drive a Nail Without a Hammer and 336 Pounds of Fury ("Nails, bolts, horseshoes, steel bars, wrenches... they don't stand a chance when Pat is around!"), also features articles such as "The Impossible Phone Book Tear," in which a strongman brags of ripping an impossible thick phone book in half. Weirdly, there actually is something inspiring about stories like this.

I have just started to read The Gripboard, which is, of course, an online forum for people who are working toward developing a pulverizing grip. I look forward to some edifying reading as I wait for my hands to recover.

LOST A POUND between last week and this week, which isn't much, but it's about what you'd expect on a typical diet, and I am glad to keep losing. I may get tired with this pace down the road and decide to dramatically reduce my calories again, but, for now, if I can lose about a pound a week, I'll be happy.

I had to buy new pants this week. It just got to the point where my previous pants, which were size 38, barely stayed on me. I was going to wait a little while to buy new pants, and I'm just going to have to do it again when my weight drops more, but that won't be for a few months, and I bought my new pants at a thrift store, so they didn't cost much. Size 36. My previous pants, when I began this diet, were too tight on me, but I refused to move up any further. 36s fit just fine now. Also, several suits that I have owned for a while, but couldn't wear because I didn't fit into them, now fit me quite nicely, and so I have been wearing them a lot, as, given the chance, I will almost always dress up.

I have stopped tracking my calories. For the moment, it seems unnecessary, as my eating habits have gotten pretty consistent, and so I now sort of know how much I can eat, and when I should stop. When I switch diets up again, I'll start counting again, but for now it just seems like busy work.

There are a lot of things I am doing now that will be completed in tiny increments over a very long time. These projects are exciting when they begin, and, I must imagine, very satisfying to compete, but when you're somewhere along the path, and your accomplishments are so infinitesimal as to only be noticeable after a few weeks or months, the process stops being very satisfying and just become a bit of a drag. I think that's sort of risky, especially for me, because if I get bored with something, I often just abandon it, figuring I can always get back to it later.

But this is not intended to be my year of abandoned projects, but of completed ones, or, at least, ones I continually worked on and completed as much as I could have. And, with weight loss, it is especially risky, because once you suspend a diet, there is a real risk that you'll start putting weight on again. I expect this, and will address it when it happens, but I have just now exited being overweight, and don't want to reenter that BMI category ever again. So it's best if I bring my weight well below what is considered to be overweight, so even if I put on a few pounds, I'm still safely within the normal range. It's the same trick I use to try to be on times for things -- I shoot to be 15 minutes early, because then, even if I'm late, I end up being on time, if you see what I am saying.

Currently, my only real goal is to drop another 38 pounds or thereabouts. Well, that goal is a long way off, and I can imagine myself getting bored as a result. I think I must add in a few intermediary goals, with real rewards, to encourage me to continue to be fastidious about weight loss.

The total weight loss I am trying for is 64 pounds. I have currently lost 26.5. That puts me less than six pounds away from the mid-point of 32 pounds lost, a weight of 172 pounds. So that's my next goal. I shall have to think of something nice to reward myself with when I reach that goal, and it shouldn't be some sort of food, as rewarding yourself with food is a bad habit to get into when you're dieting. No, I should think of something nice I want to buy myself, and would immediately if I could (and there are a few things like this) that I will instead wait to buy until I have reached my goal. I suspect, if I select something I really, really want, it will act as a very effective incentive for weight loss.

More Rock Star Skinny.

I'M VERY GLAD to accept this award. But there is no such thing as an individual award in our business. You always have a partner when you film a scene, and whatever greatness I can achieve is only possible because of the intelligence, creativity, and sheer professionalism they brought. And so I cannot accept this honor without sharing it with my scene partners: Amber Lynxx, Tara Rocks, Harry Wadd, and Jasmine Superslut.

This is our award, guys. Harry, you, in particular, deserve mention. It's always seemed strange to me that the Adult Film Federation gives only one award for Best Male Performance in a Group Sex Scene. These scenes, more than any other, are a team effort, and to single out one performer from the group for accolades seems to me to be a failure to recognize that the success of the scene relies on the shared efforts of everyone in the group. We're in a room full of professionals here, so I am certain everybody will know what I am talking about when I say that a single performer can ruin one of these scenes. I am sure we have all been in a group scene where one person, for whatever reason, wasn't giving 100 percent. I see a lot of nodding, so I know you know what I am talking about. There's simply nothing that can be done, and you can try to give it your all, but the scene is going to suffer. Well, Amber, Tara, Jasmine, and particularly Harry, have never given less than 100 percent, and in this scene in particular, I knew I could rely on their extraordinary talents to help me give my very best performance. That's why this is all of our award, and I couldn't be prouder than to share it with four people who I adore and respect so much. I've told you this before, but I would like to repeat it now, and excuse me if I get a little emotional when I say it. Guys, you're not just my coworkers. You're stars, and I am now, as I was before I ever got into this business, your biggest fan.

We all know that, for all its rewards, this is not an easy business. As with any creative undertaking, adult filmmaking attracts its share of oddball and neurotics, and, as with any lucrative business, it also attracts its share of people who are at best greedy and don't care much for the quality of the product, and, at worst, very shady customers. This is true in all of the creative professions, but, for some reason, it seems particularly true in the world of adult filmmaking. It can be a pretty cutthroat business, and, sometimes, you work long hours for little money, and, in the end, you haven't even made a film you are proud of. And so, when you find yourself in the company of real professionals, as was the case with this film, and you are as thrilled with the finished product, as we were, it's the most satisfying feeling in the world. Honestly, I suspect Girls Who Want Meat 3 might be remembered as one of the greats, and credit for that mostly goes to the film's writer, Tommy Dingus, and its director, Damien Assman. It's easy to get cynical and start thinking that all we do is churn out a devalued and disposable product, but with every one of their pictures, and especially with the Girls Who Want Meat films, Tommy and Damien remind us that there is a craft to what we do. In the right hands, it can be art.

It's what got me into this in the first place. Once you have worked in the industry for a while, it is easy to forget how magical it seems from the outside. I remember being a boy in Minneapolis, and watching adult films on television late at night. Some of you may be old enough to remember this. Certain UHF stations would pick up the scrambled signals of pay cable stations. The images were black and white, and were distorted, and frequently reversed, so that the actors had black skin and white shadows. There usually wasn't any sound, and for more than half of the film you had to sort of guess what you were seeing. But I was nonetheless enthralled. This seemed like such an amazing world, full of charming men and beautiful women, all of whom had incredible stamina and physical talents. I couldn't imagine who these glamorous creatures were, or how they lived such a life. I was fascinated. I had to find out.

Back then, it was hard to find out anything about these films. I couldn't read the names of the actors onscreen, and nobody my age seemed to know much. Oh, sure, we discussed it in the schoolyard, trading half-remembered stories that were more myth than fact. One boy would have an older brother who had met an adult actress at a bookshop on Hennepin Avenue, where she was signing autographs, and, according to the older brother, she arrived in a gold limo and walked on seven-inch tall spiked heels. Another boy claimed that his father had a collection of Super-8 films locked in an old army footlocker in the basement, and that he had left it unlocked one day, and the boy had watched a few of them. We would press him for details and he would describe scenes of athleticism that boggled our imaginations. And another boy claimed to have an uncle who was briefly in the business, as a producer, and, when drunk, would tell stories of after-hours parties with porn starlets that lasted days, and took place in the backs of taxis, in hot tubs, and in top-floor hotel suites. It didn't seem possible that such a world existed.

Of course, there were the magazines. We all grew up with them, usually keeping them hidden in tree houses or under sofas in basement rumpus rooms. The women in these magazines seemed so amazing, and so far from the world I knew. They seemed positively unreal -- so ample and uninhibited and eager and, well, adult. I couldn't believe that there were women like that in the world, and I couldn't believe there were men who wouldn't simply be terrified of them.

Of course, now I know how much of it is an illusion, and how much work goes into creating that illusion, and how unglamorous and exhausting most of our experiences are. But this has not diminished the men and women of the adult industry in my eyes. Instead, I continue to be astounded by them. Now that I know them as creatures of flesh and blood, rather than as flickering images on the television, I know that they are so much more than glamorous images of desire. Amber, as an example, is a trained nurse, and worked in emergency rooms before she made the transition into adult entertainment. When we made the Dirty Nurse trilogy together, she insisted every aspect of the production be accurate, and so brought to the film a medical verisimilitude that had never before been seen in adult filmmaking. I tell you this: Every single medical reference in that film was accurate, except, of course, for the rather comical medical condition my character suffered from -- although Amber tells me there is a virus that can cause a very similar swelling.

And Amber is just one of the many extraordinary people I have worked with. Tara, as many of you already know, is also a Tantric yoga instructor and a trained sexologist. Jasmine was a stewardess, and has been on every continent, and has stories from every place she has ever visited, some of which were turned into the movie Stewardess Slutfest, which was a big AFF winner two years ago. And, I hope you will forgive me for saying this, Harry, but Harry Wadd is quite a poet. It takes a little prompting to get him started, but once he's going he can regale you for hours with his short comic verse, which ranges from bawdy to saucy to wicked. When I got into this business, I never imagined that I might spend my nights strolling the beach at Santa Monica with a glass of Chablis with a male costar, talking about life and listening to him recite poem after poem after poem. But I'll tell you something: I've been in the backs of taxis, and the hot tubs, and the top-floor hotel suites, and the truth is, the best times I've had has been the hours I have spent listening to Harry's poems.

I guess that's what I really want to say tonight. These events are the outer trappings of our business, and they're great fun, and it is very flattering to win an award like this, and I really am honored, I really am. But I wish there were awards for the things in the business that I sometimes think are the most worthwhile, the things that keep me working even when I am surrounded by the neurotics, the oddballs, and the shady characters, and I don't know if the film I am working on is any good, and some of the other performers just seem to be phoning it in. Frustrating though that may be, I nonetheless know there are great people in this industry, doing great work, and I am honored and flattered to be able to call them my friends. That's the award I would most like to be able to share with my costars in Girls Who Want Meat 3, because that's what actually made the film as special as it is, and what, I think, may make it one of the classics.

I'm sorry, I know I'm getting a little emotional again, but that's just how I feel. Because it's the people who make these films great. Without their talent and dedication, we're just pistons, just machines that pump and grind, and I don't think that's why people watch adult films. At least, that's not why I watched. I watched for the sheer goddamn glamor of these dazzling creatures, and to be able to call them my friends now means more to me than any award. There's nobody in the world I would rather be filmed having group sex with, and that's the truth of it, and how often do you meet a group of people about whom you can say that.

I know I have gone on a bit, so let me just close by saying, if there's a boy out there who is like the boy I was, who is sitting in a basement in Minneapolis reading magazines and dreaming about this world, I'd just like to say to you: It exists, and it's more wonderful than you can possibly imagine.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I NEGLECTED to do the 21 Days task from yesterday, so I shall be doing two today. The first is to compose a post in the form of a list, which is, it seems, popular among both bloggers and blog readers. It's succinct and scannable. I already do list posts every now and then, particularly when I am working on projects that have a set series of tasks, as it helps me keep track of what I need to do.

I've been working on the fake memoir for the past week, and I have started to get some ideas for what the next steps will be one I finish the thing. Let me enumerate what I have been thinking, as it will help me sort of gel these ideals into something more tangible, and will complete the neglected task from yesterday.

SEVERAL STEPS ON THE COMPLETION OF "I'M JUST A BAD BOY, A FAKE MEMOIR":

1. First of all, complete the thing: My goal is to reach 80,000 words. I was pretty close yesterday -- within 10,000 words -- but then I went into the Google Docs document where I keep the text stored and tossed out about four stories. They were cute, but just weren't well-written enough or distinct enough for me to want them to be part of the completed project. Currently, I have about 64,000 words written. I'd like to have 80,000 words finished by May.

2. Read the entire book in public: This is a task that is actually a series of tasks, as, obviously, there won't be much opportunity for me to sit down with an audience and read all 80,000 words in one sitting. Instead, I will take each story independently to open readings and the like and read them in front of an audience. When I have workshopped plays I have written, seeing or participating in a public performance like this has always been the most useful exercise. I think it is because I am quite familiar with the experience of being an audience member, and a critical and professional audience member, at that. So, when I have an audience for something I have written, I sort of reflexively experience that piece as an audience member, and react to it how I would were I in the audience. Additionally, it gives me a chance to gauge how actual audience members respond to my writing, and, if they react differently than I expected, to revise, if needed.

3. Revise the book: This will happen concurrently with my reading the stories. By the time I finished reading every single story, I should also have gone in and made whatever revisions I feel are necessary.

4. Ask friends to proof the draft: I am rather bad at proofing my own text, which I don't think is unusual; My eyes tend to see what I think I have written, instead of what I have actually written. So, once the revised text is completed, I will ask a friend, or several friends, to look at the material and make sure there are no typos, etc.

5. Write up a query letter and prepare a sample of the manuscript: There is something of an art to composing an effective query letter to send to publishers, and so I shall need to take some time to write a very good one.

6. In the meanwhile, send stories off to contests: This is an ongoing project. I have already begun sending stories from this collection to contests that seem appropriate matches. Coupled with this:

7. Send stories off to magazines for possible publication: As I see it, a collection of short stories is going to be more likely to attract the attention of a publisher if it contains some stories that have been published already or have won awards.

8. Make list of book publishers: The trick will be to get my manuscript into the hands of a publishing firm that would actually publish something like what I am writing, and, if possible, to get it into the hands of an editor who would be sympathetic to the manuscript. This will require some research.

9. Ask published writers I know for recommendations: I have quite a few friends who are published. When I am ready to start sending off my manuscripts, I will ask them if they have any suggestions for where I might send the text, and if they have any connections to facilitate the process.

10. Send out the query letters, and, if accepted, the manuscript: Then it would seem it is just a matter of waiting to see if anybody is interested, doesn't it? But, no, there is one other thing I want to do:

11. Prepare the text of the manuscript for readings: I would like to adapt what I have written so I can perform it from the stage. What I have in mind is, essentially, a reading of the text, so I'm not thinking about anything fancy. But there are several local venues where that I think might be a good match for a month-long reading of the text, and I may also apply to next year's Fringe Festival with this project.

It's a lot of steps, and some of them are made up of many smaller steps. And each step of the way is like a little lottery -- in the instance of the Fringe Festival, it is very literally a lottery, as that is how they decide who is going to perform. Nothing may come of this, which means that every one of these steps may be an exercise in futility. I am writing a very strange little collection of stories, and I know it, and you can never tell how people will respond to that, so my efforts at publication may be rebuffed. Additionally, even if I were to find a publisher, the likelihood is that, like most books published, it just wouldn't make much money or attract much attention.

Fortunately, a long time ago I gave up all hope of ever succeeding at anything, and just decided to go ahead and do the steps required to get things done, regardless of whether anything ever comes of it. And why not? What else is there to do with our time? Get bored and complain about it?

I've got better thing to do with my time, even if it never amounts to much.

THIS IS THE JOKE I always hear. Every time somebody calls. Every single time:

"Did you know it was me?"

Of course I did. I'm psychic. I always know. I know what the winning lottery ticket will be. I know which horse will win the race. I know what movies will win the Academy Awards. Even if I haven't met you, I know your name. I know your mother's name. I know your husband's name, and who he is sleeping with, and how they like to do it. I know the day you're going to die. I know the day I'm going to die. I know how I am going to die, although I don't like to think about it.

So I should be a millionaire, right? I should bet one the winning horse. I should buy pick the winning lottery numbers, shouldn't I? Why don't I?

I don't because I don't. I know that sounds circular, so let me be clear. I know every moment of my life, from my birth to my death. At no time during that span do I buy a winning lottery ticket. I never make more than $18 thousand dollars per year, and I make it doing this, reading palms. There is no moment in my future when I bet on a dog and win, or buy the right stocks, or even answer the phone and say, Don, I knew you would call. It never happens.

I suppose you're wondering why I don't try. I know it is hard to understand if you are not me. But imagine that you know everything that is going to happen, and you are always right. Always. Well, what do you suppose happens if you go to bet on a pony, even though you know you never do that?

Well, then suddenly you were wrong about something. And if you were wrong about whether or not you bet on the pony, who is to say you won't be wrong about which pony wins?

I tried to change things once. I imagine we all do. We want to think our destiny is not fixed. We want to think that we might be wrong about things. Because we see what is to come, and sometimes we don't like what we see. We see a woman with a child, and we know that child will fall into a pool and drown. We see a small dog, and know he will be run over in the street tomorrow. We see a young couple, and know the young man will lose his temper and kill the young woman. Sometimes, these are the people who come in to get their palms read, and sometimes they joking ask if we knew they would be coming. Yes, we know. But we don't say, because it's not on our path to do so. No, we tell them vague forecasts of trips abroad and big changes. We want to tell them what they should know. Mind your child! Leash your dog! Do not marry!

But we can see our own future, and know we will not tell them, and so we don't.

Except once.

She was drunk when she came in. I had always known she would come in. I had always known what she would look like: slender and small and wide-eyed with a cockeyed grin. I had always known what her name would be: Annie Hopkins. And I had always known what her first words would be: Did you know I would be coming? I also knew that I would fall in love with her.

And I always knew that she would be dead within three hours.

There's not much to the story of her death. A car crash on a wet street. No seat belt. A bruise in the shape of a steering wheel on her chest. A collapsed lung. It's a common enough accident, and she wasn't the first to come into my storefront palm reading parlor to have that particular tragedy ahead of her.

But this time it was different, because I fell in love with her.

It was always to be. I would read her palms, and promise adventure ahead, and she would linger in my shop, curious. She would ask me questions about my life, and I would tell her a few things, and offer her some wine, and we would talk until late in the evening. She would tell me of her degree in Asian Studies, and the three years she spent in India, and she would insist that I must go to Bangladesh. She was quite certain that I would love it. And we would talk about books we enjoyed, and I would show her photographs of my dogs. It would not take much for me to fall in love with her. I had, in some ways, been in love with her my entire life. I had just been waiting for this night to make it official.

Perhaps it wasn't really love. I only knew her a few hours, and, although we made plans to meet for a movie, I knew that she would not see the movie with me. The plans were made for the same day her funeral would fall on, which I would attend, if I didn't tell her. I would join her family in mourning her, and, after the funeral, her father would come up to me and greet me, and ask me how I knew her. And I would lie and say we were from the same neighborhood and only met briefly, but I had been struck by her sense of humor and her kindness, and when I heard about her death I had to give my respects. This is what I would say to her father if I let her leave my shop without telling her.

Perhaps it wasn't really love. Perhaps it was just a crush. I would not know her long enough to know how I really felt about her if I let her leave my shop. Because she would leave drunk on the wine I gave her, and she would crash her car, and she would die.

All my life I knew she would leave and I wouldn't tell her. So what if I did? What would happen? If I was wrong about not telling her, maybe I would also be wrong about the accident. Maybe I could convince her to stay until the rain stopped. And maybe I would never be right about anything again. Maybe that's what happens when you change things. Maybe you stop being able to see things. Maybe my life would be different than how I always knew it would be. Could it be that there might be a different future for me if I reject the future I have already seen? What would it be like? Might I make more money? Might I make less? Might there be love?

If you have always known everything, thinking that one day you might know nothing is terrifying. But it is also liberating. And, I suppose, love is also that. We do things for love that we might never do, even though they terrify us, because they might also liberate us.

And so I decided to tell Annie Hopkins not to leave my shop. Not to go out in the rain. Not to get in her car. I decided to do something I have never done, and would never do.

And so that brings us to this moment right now. Here you are in front of me, Annie, drunk and ready to leave. And what happens?

I open my mouth to speak to you, Annie, and I say nothing. You pause and look back at me, eyebrows raised.

"You have such a funny look on your face," you say.

I say nothing.

You pull your coat on, grinning at me. "I wonder what you're thinking," you say. "It must be wonderful to be psychic."

You wink at me. "I'll see you Saturday," you say. And you leave my shop.

And that's how I always knew it would happen. You will be dead soon, and I will be at your funeral on Saturday, and that's where we have always been headed, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

The phone rings. I go to answer it. It is a friend. "I bet you knew it was me," the friend says, and laughs.

"No," I say, as I was always going to say.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

ALL I EVER WANTED TO BE WAS A NORMAL KID. But, of course, I wasn't.

I was twee.

I was in a school for prodigies. Some were very good with numbers, and created little games out of math. Some had a talent for language, and spoke in rhymed and metered verse. Some could paint, some could sing, and some could compose sonatas in their heads, while sitting at a desk, waiting to be excused for lunch.

I never felt I was one of those kids. And I wasn't. I couldn't do any of the things they did, and I was the only child in that school who had been accepted on the exclusive basis of how terribly, terribly twee I was.

You have to understand. Back in the early Seventies, tweeness was considered to be a separate, and worthwhile, discipline. Twee children were celebrated. There was even an afternoon television program called Now We Are Twee, about four such children, two boys and two girls, who spent each episode having little meaningful adventures, such as going to the zoo and having conversations with the llamas, or going to the library and discovering an ancient pressed flower in the pages of a musty old book, and crying about the sheer beauty of it. The study of twee was briefly in vogue in psychological circles, with an academic magazine, Twee Trends, dedicated to the topic, with peer-reviewed articles with topics such as "Kitsch Without Camp: Why Twee Children Genuinely Love the Mawkish" and "32 Reactions from Twee Children Upon Visiting a Museum of Natural History."

I was one of those 32 children, and my reaction was fairly typical: I made plans to move into the museum and live in a closet, subsisting on crackers and root beer. Back in the 70s, almost every natural history museum had one or two twee children living there. It was understood to be a sign of good luck.

If you were to see me at age 10, back in 1978, here is what I would have looked like: I was small and very thin, and wore a striped shirt and white pants with an enormous belt buckle. I also wore a fisherman's cap. I carried a book bag from the Walker Art Center, and in that book bag you might find the following items:

1. A nose flute
2. A packet of jelly beans
3. A Chinese finger trap
4. A Silver Surfer comic book
5. A photograph of my eccentric aunt Dalia; we doted on each other
6. A shark tooth I claimed to have found on a beach somewhere, but actually purchased at an aquarium
7. A pen knife, which would eventually be the source of great drama, and the threat of tragedy

Properly, twee children should have huge, owl-like glasses, but I had not been diagnosed as myopic at that point, and so had none. I did occasionally wear aviator sunglasses that had been given to me by my test pilot stepfather, a man who respected but did not understand me. I wore these when I wanted to hide from the world and collect my thoughts, which was often, and was the subject of a monograph in Twee Trends called "Behind the Mirrored Lenses: A Twee Boy Collects His Thoughts."

This is the story of my last days at the special school, and also, in a way, is the tale of the end of twee as an academic discipline. It is the story of a boy in a fisherman's cap and a knife, and begins, as all twee stories do, on an autumn day in the 1970s, in an unexpected place. In this instance, we shall start our story in a small room at the University of Minnesota, where 10 year old Bunny is being tested by a man in a white coat.

The test is an ordinary one. Bunny will be expected to build something out of blocks, and toss and catch a baseball, and answer a few simple questions. But, being twee, Bunny is having a hard time with the tests. He has tried to build a sperm whale out of the blocks, because he has decided he particularly likes sperm whales, but he wants to build it life size, and there are not enough blocks. So he builds as much of the sperm whale as he can and stops, and what he has built is just a pile of blocks on the floor.

"What is that?" the man in the white coat asks.

"A sperm whale, or, at least, part of one," Bunny answers. "Do you have any more blocks? I'll need about 30,000."

"Catch this ball," the man in the white coat says, and tosses a baseball at Bunny. Bunny reacts the way he always has when things are thrown at him. He doubles up on the ground, sobbing. This is a rather typical response for twee children, conditioned into them by traumatic experiences in Little League baseball. The man in the white coat makes a note of this.

He lifts a clipboard with pages on it. "Tell me, Bunny," he begins. "If your stepfather had two houses, and he sold one, how many houses would he have?"

"Three," Bunny says.

"Don't you mean one?" the man asks, gently.

"No," Bunny answers. "Because if stepdaddy where to finally sell the mansion in the Hamptons, he could make enough money to buy two more houses, like I have suggested. We could buy one in Hawaii, where I could learn to play ukulele and carve driftwood sculptures, and we could have one in Bath, England, where I would be near Stonehenge, and maybe could meet some real pagans and have adventures with them."

"You've given this a lot of thought, haven't you?" the man in the white coat asks.

"Not particularly," Bunny answers.

It is a lie. Bunny lies a lot. All twee children do. The lies are always obvious to everybody but the twee child, and other, non-twee children are frequently made very angry by them. Bunny gets bullied a lot as a result, and this is why he is now being tested by the man in the white coat. His name is Dr. Reginald Arkansas, and he is working on a monograph titled "I Just Couldn't Bear to Hear About His Flower Garden Again: Why Even Non-Bullies Turn Into Bullies Around Twee Children." Dr. Arkansas will be an observer throughout this story, taking notes for his monograph, but will not actually be seen again until the end of the story, when he steps in to avert the tragedy. But make no mistake, he will be present throughout, hiding around corners, behind two-way mirrors, and in disguise, observing.

Bunny returns to school. As I have mentioned, this is a special school, a magnet program for gifted students begun by a peculiar order of French nuns. They do not dress like nuns, and, unlike nuns that you may have heard of, are very liberal in their approach to education. But each day begins with a prayer, which the students are supposed to write. Bunny was asked to write one, once, but he forgot and when it was his time to say the prayer, he tried to fake his way through it by singing a song he had just composed on the spot. The song was called "I Eat Tuna," and neither rhymed nor had any recognizable melody, and so the nuns recognized that twee children may not be predisposed toward this sort of activity, and never asked Bunny to write a prayer again. Instead, today, the prayer has been composed and is being read by Thommy Seagram, a small boy with a high voice and prematurely grey hair. He is not a twee child, but is exactly the sort of child twee children have as best friends. You will not be surprised to hear that he is Bunny's best friend.

Thommy reads a short poem about how God made everything on the earth and in the ocean, and everybody says amen, and then Bunny and Thommy do what they do every morning at school -- they stare at a little girl named Francine Wu, and wonder what she might be like. Francine Wu is painfully shy. She is so shy that when she is called on in class to answer an academic question, she blushes and cannot speak. But she is supposed to be a world-class chess player. Bunny and Thommy are fascinated by her, mostly because she is very pretty, and, in Bunny's case, she's exactly the sort of girl twee boys are attracted to. Bunny will sometimes sit opposite her at lunch and talk at her. She doesn't look at him or respond, but Bunny does not care, instead telling her stories of how he once helped his older brother, who fights oil well fires, or how he stowed away once on a rocket to the moon. Bunny is not shy like Francine Wu is. He is simply a liar.

After staring at Francine for a while, Thommy and Bunny go to separate classes. Thommy is a precocious student of languages, and so the nuns have him learning Latin. All the classes are organized around the student's abilities. And so, of course, Bunny's first class isn't really a class at all, but instead a long walk along the railroad tracks near the school, where Bunny can do the sorts of things twee children do on this kind of walks, which typically involves pretending to be a hobo, or finding an injured animal and trying to nurse it back to health, but getting distracted and forgetting it, and then crying when it dies. At that time, it was popularly believed that twee children were unusually good at learning life lessons. That theory has since been discredited, of course.

* * *

That day, Bunny stumbled across something unexpected: A young couple making love. Now, Bunny had been told the facts of life by his step-father, but he had not understood what was being told to him, and was behind his aviator sunglasses, so it is very likely that he was thinking about how much he liked snails, or how he was going to start wearing nothing but plaid, or how long he could live off root beer and crackers in a natural history museum, or something like that. And, as I have said, Bunny is not shy. So on this day he walked up to the young couple and demanded to know what they were doing.

The young couple flailed about to cover themselves with a picnic blanket, the young man screaming for Bunny to go away. And Bunny did so. But Bunny was quite alarmed by what he had seen, and decided to draw pictures of it to try to understand it better.

Now, most twee children have some sort of little creative skill, or several. They're usually not especially good at whatever they do, but they're better than most. Bunny could whittle a little bit, and he could play the drums a little bit, and he could draw reasonably well. So, while his illustrations were not the sort of thing you might look at and say, my God, what a prodigy, when Bunny drew a young couple making love, you would recognize what he was illustrating. So it didn't take the nuns long to discover the pictures, especially as Bunny spent the entire lunch hour showing them to Francine Wu, who refused to look at them or eat, but just sat there blushing.

So Bunny was called into the office of the headmistress, a nun named Sister Anne, who Bunny had always thought was the prettiest woman he had ever seen. Sister Anne was only 24 at the time, but, this being a progressive order of nuns, she had been put in charge of the school because she was especially good at running schools, and because she too had been a child prodigy, and so the nuns felt that, despite her youth, she would be an appropriate headmistress. Sister Anne had been a ballerina, but, at age 18, had gotten a fever that had ruined her sense of balance, and so her career in ballet ended before it really even got a chance to begin.

But, because she was young, and a nun, she didn't really know what to say about the pornographic images that Bunny had produced over the course of the day. There was no precedent for this. Twee children do many strange things, but there was no existing literature suggesting they might be sexual precocious. Quite the opposite, in fact -- most developed late, after a period of sublimating their sexuality into strange behaviors, such as wearing kilts or grinding their hips against trees. So sister Anne did not know precisely what to say to Bunny. And so they stared at each other for close to half an hour, Sister Anne growing increasingly self-conscious, and feeling any confidence she had dwindling, and Bunny thinking about how pretty Sister Anne was, and how he wanted to marry her, and wondering why he had the urge to grind his hips against a tree.

After a very long time, Sister Anne thanked Bunny for seeing him, excused him, and called her Mother Superior to resign as headmistress. In tears, she explained that she was just too young and inexperienced to have a job like this.

Word quickly got out that Bunny had done something to cause Sister Anne to resign. And if the presence of a twee child is enough to turn almost any kid into a bully, this news was enough to make bullies of the whole school at the same time. The students loved Sister Anne, and were furious with Bunny for causing her to leave. Nobody knew precisely what Bunny had done, but there had been an episode of Now We Are Twee in which a twee child had accidentally started a fire by playing with magnifying glasses, so everybody knew twee children had a capacity to be enormously destructive by accident.

Now, Bunny was never in any real physical danger. After all, this was a school for gifted children, and so almost every student there was physically weak, many has asthma, and most had a terror of touching other students. But they spent the next few days being uncommonly mean to Bunny, the way children often are. They would surround him and make up rhymes about how bad he smelled, and, being gifted children, these rhymes were uncommonly well-composed, often with rather daring experiments in meter. One trumpet player followed Bunny from class to class, playing souza marches at the back of his head, which left Bunny with painfully ringing ears. Some of the art students began to draw especially bold caricatures of Bunny and hide them in his comic books, so that, when he was flipping though an issue of the Silver Surfer's adventures, he would see himself with a poopy butt. And what sounds like a childish taunt becomes something quite horrifying when it is actually represented as a work of art.

But nothing the other children did to torment Bunny could compare to the pain he felt in his heart, and his bewildered sense of guilt. He had, after all, been planning to marry Sister Anne. After his meeting with the nun, he had immediately gone to Thommy and told him that he had proposed to Sister Anne, and she had accepted, and he was embarrassed to think that Thommy might think he had lied. Of course, Thommy had assumed that Bunny was lying, but twee children never know that their lies are obvious and that people shrug them off. Bunny had also spent a lot of time talking at Francine Wu about how much he loved Sister Anne. Because Francine Wu kept her face turned away from him, as she always did, Bunny could not see that she was crying.

Well, Bunny just felt like his whole world had collapsed around him. And so Bunny disappeared. He was gone for two days, and finally Thommy went to Francine Wu to talk to her. She didn't answer him back, but Thommy told Francine that he was worried about Bunny, and he thought he knew where Bunny might be, and would she help Thommy find him? And, without a word, Francine Wu gathered her things and stood, and both walked to the Bell Museum of Natural History. They spent several hours searching the museum, and finally found Bunny hiding in a closet in the Touch and See room. He had his aviator sunglasses on and, for some reason, an unlit cigarette dangling out of his mouth. He also had his pen knife open, and it was pressed again his wrist, as though he meant to harm himself.

For the first time they had ever heard it happen, Francine Wu spoke. "I hate you, Bunny," she said, and threw herself at him, raining her tiny fists down on his head and shoulders. Bunny did not seem to notice. After a while, she stopped and ran out of the room, sobbing. Bunny then removed his aviator glasses and looked at Thommy.

"We need to do a suicide pact, Thommy," he said.

"No," Thommy said.

"You're my best friend," Bunny said.

"You're an idiot," Thommy said. "Sister Anne never said she would marry you."

"Yes she did," Bunny said.

"She is a nun, Bunny," Thommy said. "Nuns don't get married."

Bunny had not known this. "They don't?' he asked.

"They're married to Jesus," Thommy said.

This just confused Bunny, who was Jewish. And so he did what he always did when he was confused. He did a big dramatic gesture to distract everybody. In this instance, he cut his wrist. Thommy saw it, and started to cry.

* * *

This is the moment when Dr. Arkansas emerges from his hiding place. He has been squatting behind the polar bear in the Touch and See Room for two days, observing Bunny and taking notes. And, in those two days, Dr. Arkansas has radically revised his theory about twee children. For one thing, he has abandoned the idea that twee children are unusually good at learning life lessons. Over the course of the two days Bunny has been in the natural history museum, he has repeatedly gone to a wooden case filled with drawers. The case contains all sorts of things for children to handle, such as rocks and pelts of fur. One of the drawers contains a plastic spider. Bunny has opened that drawer 15 times, and every time been surprised by the spider, and shouted in terror. Once, he opened the drawer three times in two hours, and every time behaved as though it was the first time he had seen the spider.

Twee children were presumed to be unusually smart. Dr. Arkansas no longer believes this. When Bunny first arrived, he had seven bottles of root beer and 14 packets of Ritz crackers. Bunny carefully divvied up his stash, talking to himself, figuring out how much he could eat and how often so that the crackers and pop would last two days. He then ate all the crackers and drank all the pop in the next half hour. Bunny has been eating carpet ever since.

So when Dr. Arkansas sees Bunny cut his own wrist, it's the final straw. He emerges from behind the polar bear, marches over to Bunny, and takes the pen knife away from him. He takes Bunny into the bathroom and washes and bandages his wound, which is very shallow. Then Dr. Arkansas takes Bunny to find Francine Wu and makes him apologize to her. Bunny doesn't really know why he's apologizing to her, but that doesn't surprise Dr. Arkansas. In the past two days, he has become convinced that twee children are, in fact, idiots.

Dr. Arkansas will soon publish a monograph called "Free To Be You and Twee: Rethinking the Theory." And, with his monograph, the academic study of twee will virtually disappear, and twee children will no longer be treated as gifted, but instead as weirdos, which is consistent with how twee children have always been treated, for for that single decade in the late 60s and early 70s when people briefly thought them unique and wonderful.

Perhaps it's for the best. After all, I never wanted to be twee. All I wanted to be was a normal kid.

Although, as anybody who knows me can tell you, and you have probably guessed, that is a lie.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I HAVE DECIDED to participate in Problogger's 21 Days to Build a Better Blog project. I am doing this because, as anybody who has read my blog knows, I am obsessed with projects. Today's task is to write something called an "elevator pitch" about my blog. This is a very simple, 150 word or less description of the content and focus of a blog; it's short enough that it can be delivered on an elevator between floors, where, I suppose, all the big moneymaking deals about blogs are made. Mine first attempt as follows:

50000000 Sparber Fans Can't Be Wrong is an online toybox for writer Bunny Sparber, where he experiments with fiction, original music, short movies, and oddball projects.

That's a pretty accurate description of the blog, but not really a pitch. As I understand it, elevator pitches are supposed to be a little like advertisements, in that they don't so much describe a thing as sell it, generally using the common sales tool of explaining to someone what problem their product solves. So what problem does my blog solve?

Well, boredom, I guess. So how to rephrase my pitch to include this?

50000000 Sparber Fans is an online toybox for the bored. Consisting of humorous short stories, original novelty songs, oddball projects, and astounding true stories, the blog is a peek into the unique world of writer Bunny Sparber.

I suspect I can do better -- this version sounds like a badly written ad. I am quite exhausted now, so I'm going to go to bed, and perhaps revisit the pitch tomorrow. For the moment, this description will do.

IT WASN'T UNTIL the fourth viewing that I saw myself in the film.

I had no idea what Tony was talking about when he congratulated me on appearing in the Harrison Ford movie. I told him I wasn't in it, but he insisted I was, or, at least, someone who looked just like me was. He lent me a DVD, and told me the scene I appear in. It is a short one, a foot chase through midtown Manhattan, and, just as Harrison Ford passes the Amtrack concourse of Penn Station, he passes a man in a cap. I failed to notice the man in the cap on the first three viewings. On viewing four, I froze the frame.

It was me.

At least, the man in the cap looked like me. And not just his face. Sure, his face had the same oval shape as mine, and the same sad eyes and slightly startled look. But I don't know if I would have recognized the man from that. I am often told people look like me, and I don't see it; it's possible I wouldn't see it even if someone looked exactly like me, as this man did.

No, there was more. He was wearing thickly framed glasses that looked to be tinted blue. He had a green newsboy cap on his head, and wore a rather battered looking military surplus three-quarter length trenchcoat.

My clothes.

Of course, it wasn't me. I checked the movie's filming dates, and I wasn't in New York at the time. I didn't expect to discover I was, as it seemed unlikely to me that I would have been an extra in a Harrison Ford movie and then forgot about it. The only explanation that made sense was one of coincidence: There must be another man out there who looks very much like me and has similar clothes. After all, chunky glasses, newsboy caps, and military trenchcoats aren't that unusual. It seemed like an improbable coincidence, but aren't coincidences always improbable?

Since I first saw the man who looks like me in the Harrison Ford movie, three years ago, I have seen him 135 times. He has appeared in low-budget horror movies, big-budget special effects spectaculars, foreign art house films, and three documentaries. He is never anything more than an extra, and rarely appears for more than a moment. He is always in the same outfit of glasses, cap, and trenchcoat. I am also certain I have spotted him on television, but I do not have TIVO, and so cannot back up the show to double-check. If it his him, I see him at least once per week, and sometimes daily, appearing in crowd scenes in sitcoms, in the background of news footage, on made-for-television movies, and occasionally in music videos. Perhaps it is not him, but it may be. I will see glasses for a moment, or cap, or trenchcoat. Just for an instant, mind you, a subliminal blip that I think I recognize.

Of course, I have been curious about the man. I presume he is a professional extra. I have heard about such people -- apparently, it is possible to make a living in New York and Los Angeles by working regularly as an extra in films and on television. This man must be particularly good at it, as I have seen him in productions that were not just filmed in New York or LA, but in Chicago and San Francisco and New Orleans and Florida, among other places. He's a curiosity, all right. Generally, extras don't wear the same clothes in every film in which they appear. He does. And generally extras don't appear in documentaries. He has.

I have done some digging. His name isn't listed on any credits, but, of course, they wouldn't be. Only actors with speaking roles are given credits. Exras are seen as being set dressing, and you wouldn't credit them any more than you would a chair or a table. But full-time professional extras are only represented by a few agencies, and I have called them to see what I can chase down. They have not been helpful, even when I claimed to be a film producer looking for that extra to offer him a more substantial film role, having seen him in a Ben Affleck film and thought he looked right for a part. And it's not that the agencies did not want to help me find the man. They simply couldn't. They handle so many extras, and, in crowd scenes, there may be 200 or more people, most of whom are not under contract and simply respond to a call that goes out on a mailing list. Perhaps if he were a recurring extra, as they sometimes have on long-running television shows. If he was one of the actors who you always see on a stool in that stitcom set in a bar, for example, or one of the crewmen on that television show set in space?

But he isn't. He's just a guy in a crowd. Almost every crowd scene filmed, it seems.

I am adopted. So, of course, sometimes I wonder if this man might be a relative. I have heard stories of twins who have been separated and discovered each other through unlikely circumstances. Perhaps that is my story.

Questions like this itch. I mean they seem to physically itch. You don't want to think about them, but they irritate you, and, the more you try to ignore them, the larger the irritation grows. And this is an especially annoying itch, in that so many questions remain unanswered. I mean, why does he appear in documentaries? I can't make sense of it. Just that question alone would be a horrible bother, but it's just one of so many questions.

I won't be satisfied until I track this man down. And I think I know how.

I have some vacation time coming, and I have friends in Los Angeles. Perhaps it is time I was in a few crowd scenes of my own.

* * *

Ove the course of a week, I appeared as an extra three times. In the first, I stood in the doorway of a Hollywood souvenir shop as Jackie Chan scampered up a wall near me, fleeing black-suited killers from the mob. In the second, I cheered a baseball team to victory. In the third, I pretended to be terrified as an unseen dinosaur, represented by two volleyballs on the end of a long stick, attacked the La Brea Tar Pits. It was not hard to get these roles -- you can sign up for them online -- and they were quite fun. And I discovered how the man in the cap managed to wear the same clothes in every shoot. Because I did too. I wore my chunky glasses and my newsboy cap and my military trechcoat, and nobody said anything about it, or seemed to care much. I was on each set for about 12 hours, and, of course, most of that time was spent waiting for an assistant director or PA to come get us and tell us what to do; 90 percent of filmmaking, as far as I can tell, consists of setting up lights. Most of the extras had brought books and small collapsible chairs, like you might buy to take to the beach or a parade. Many of these extras were seasoned pros. None of them had ever seen a man who looks and dresses like me, although they listened to my story with great amusement.

The man in the cap, however, did not show up for these crowd scenes, and so I never met him and did not find out what his story is, which was disappointing.

In fact, I got to enjoy doing extra work. When I returned to Minneapolis, I continued to get emails telling me about opportunities to appear as an extra. After a few months, I decided to move to Los Angeles, taking a gig there as a theater critic for an independent news weekly. The pay wasn't good, but I found regular work as an extra, and this supplemented my income nicely. I continued to dress in my glasses, cap, and trenchcoat, in the hopes of meeting my phantom double, but never did; because I exclusively appeared in crowd shots, the film crew never cared what I wore. They scarcely noticed me, in fact. There were a few days when, walking down Hollywood Boulevard, I would pass a news crew doing an interview, and I always made a point of walking into the shot, in the background, just to pass through. I suppose I hoped my double might see me on television and try to seek me out.

It takes about a year for a film to appear in theaters once it has been shot. So a year after my first gig as an extra, I went to a screening of the Jackie Chan film. Extras had warned me not to expect too much. The scenes go by so quickly, and there are usually so many people on the screen, that the chance of seeing yourself is remote. If you're lucky, you'll catch just a little blur of yourself, just for an instant.

But the Hollywood souvenir scene went on for more than a minute, and I was clearly visible in the shot for most of it, idly looking at a map to the homes of stars as Jackie Chan did some astounding acrobatics behind me.

And there, to my right, in glasses, cap, and trenchcoat, was my double. He doesn't appear in the scene for long -- he walks up to a register, wallet in hand, apparently preparing to buy something.

I know what happened. We were both on the set, but never in the same place at the same moment. We were dressed the same. And, because we were never seen side-by-side, people assumed there was just one of us. I don't know how I missed him. It was my first film appearance, and I was a bit overwhelmed, and there is so much going on. And, besides, he only appears for a moment. So, strange though it may seem, the fact that we were in the film together and did not know it makes perfect sense.

There's just one problem with that theory, though. Because he was in my next film as well. We're in the same box, cheering the same team, just seven feet from each other. We never seem aware of each other, but I can't believe I would have been in the same scene with this man, and be so close, and not notice him. Additionally, what director would put us both in the same shot?

I struggle to explain this. I suppose the director might have thought we were twins, and might have thought it would be funny to have us together, as identical twins are always a source of onscreen humor, or easy surrealism, in the way that little people or albinos are. Still, it seems unlikely.

The truth is, I no longer know what I am seeing. The itch that this man causes is unbearable, and it is made worse by the fact that his mystery has proven to be unsolvable, despite the fact that I have been on the very same set with him, on the very same day, within seven feet of him.

It does not help that he is also in the third movie in which I appeared as an extra. It is the dinosaur movie, and the volleyballs on sticks have been replaced by an extraordinary piece of computer animation. This dinosaur creates havoc in Los Angeles, eventually sinking into the tar pits, while a group watches him die.

I am in the crowd. So is my double. And we are standing side by side.

As the dinosaur dies, my double looks at the camera and winks.

* * *

I have decided not to worry about it. I enjoy my life in Los Angeles, I enjoy my work, and this little mystery just makes it all the more entertaining. My double has not hurt me, and I don't think I have any reason to worry.

But one thing has occurred to me, and I keep thinking about it, because I can't help myself.

I keep wondering if somewhere out there, there might be another me, and he is just now noticing the two of us on the screen. Why not? It's no stranger than what is going on now. In fact, thinking about this gives me a strange little thrill, and an unexpected bit of comfort. Because it would mean I am not alone in being confused. Somewhere in the world, right at this moment, somebody who looks and dresses just like me might be watching a movie and puzzling at what he sees. Perhaps he will make some phone calls. Perhaps one day he might even wind up in Hollywood, dressed in his glasses, cap, and trenchcoat, and make his way onto a film set to appear as an extra in a crowd scene. Who knows how many of us might be out there.

Tomorrow, when I head to another set to do another day of work, if I can get away with it, I'll look directly at the camera and give it a wink.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

WHOSE HANDS HURT?

Bunny's hands hurt, that's whose.

I decided I would take the day off from squeezing my Captains of Crush gripper, in order to give my hands a chance to heal from the workout I've been giving them. But I also decided that, if they were going to get a day off, I was going to make them earn it.

So yesterday I put my hands through a real workout, squeezing the gripper many, many times, and also forcing the gripper all the way closed and then holding it closed for as long as I could, which was not very long. This morning, my hands felt like a car had driven over them, then backed up and driven over them again. Squeezing my fingers causes pain. Making a fist causes pain. And here it is, almost midnight, and they still ache. So I may have to take tomorrow off as well.

But I have not been able to squeeze the gripper shut since I first got it, and I am determined to, and so it's time to get my hands used to taking a beating.

I will say this: I have had the gripper for a week, and the difference is already noticeable. My hands feel stronger and harder. I squeezed my old grippers shut a few days ago, just to see how it felt. It felt like squeezing a pillow. And, on Friday, Coco gave me a fresh bottle of spaghetti sauce to open. She had tried to open it and found it was screwed on too tightly, and so she gave it to me to open. I expected to have to squeeze and wrestle it, like I usually do, before it would eventually give.

Instead, with just a slight twist, it opened with a pop. Both Coco and I were flabbergasted. After all, I've just started with this thing, and am only on the trainer model.

I am starting to wonder what my grip will be like when I am able to squeeze a number 3 shut without an difficulty. I've heard you can easily tear a phone book in half, but that sounded like an exaggeration. I'm starting to think it may not be.

THE FLIGHT from Phoenix to Minneapolis was terrible. Despite warning posters throughout the Phoenix airport, I stupidly left my suitcase unattended for a few minutes while I went to purchase a copy of the New Yorker. Drug traffickers took advantage of my foolishness, stuffing 25 rubber balloons filled with PCP into my rectum. One of the balloons developed a slow leak, so I spent the entirety of my two-and-a-half hour flight wandering back and forth in the aisle of the 727, pulling off my clothes and declaring myself to be a Monkey God.

My airline was a new one. The company was trying to develop a reputation for excellent customer service, so the flight attendants did nothing but follow me, collecting up my clothes and offering me complimentary beverages. "Would the Monkey God like a Pepsi?" they asked. "How about some nice tea?" Unfortunately, the security department at the Twin Cities International Airport proved to be less accommodating. They waited for me to deplane with a squad of 14 men, dressed like a SWAT team in black riot gear. They very nearly succeeded in subduing me, but one of them struck me in the stomach with a baton, bursting a balloon. I vaguely remember the sounds of screaming and cracking bones, and I remember scampering up a luggage carousel and leaping onto the tarmac. I stole a truck that was lugging ten carts of baggage, but the next six months of my life are a blank. If this tattoo of a flying eyeball is any indication, I may have been part of a bike gang.

Also, I sometimes get cryptic phone calls. The phone will ring very late at night. When I answer, I am met with a hushed voice offering up a name, an address, and a date. I can't be certain what this is about. It's possible I was a hit man.

But I am not here to worry about what may have happened when I am high, but, instead, to focus on being sober. I am surrounded by other addicts, all with their own terrifying stories. We gather in groups every day, overseen my amiable therapists and professional counselors, to tell our stories, and to tell of our daily struggle with our addiction. One will rise and tell of how he sold his children to buy coke. Sold his children! Apparently, they are lost now, part of a vast underworld network of similar children, all sold into slavery by addicted parents, all selling maps to stars homes in Hollywood. The father weeps as he tells this story, but also admits that there are many, many time he looks at his nieces and nephews and wonders how long it would be before they are missed.

There was a woman in the program who traded sexual favors for pills. Any pill. She claimed she once gave herself to four men at once in exchange for seven Flintstone vitamins. As it turned out, she was both a bit of a pathological liar and a pathological sex addict, so she was transferred to another program, much to the disappointment of the men in our program, and some of the women. I still get valentine's cards from her.

This program is very hard for me. Not because of my addiction. PCP is not especially addictive, and I only did it once, by accident. So I can't discuss my struggles with addiction. Neither can I share the horror stories of my six months on the sherm, as I don't remember them. But the courts gave me little choice: Either I went to rehab or I went to jail. There are certain things that are expected of you. And I can tell you from bitter experience that nobody here appreciated it when you say that you don't care if you never take another drug in your life. They react badly when you stand to tell your horror stories and confess you don't remember, and you hope never to remember. It's bad enough having my fellow patients give me the cold shoulder as a result of this. But, worse still, my case manager decided I was simply refusing to participate. He explained to me that, unless I am willing to give myself over to the program, he could not, in good conscience, decide that I was far enough into the recovery process to release me from the program. Worse still, a bad word from him could cause men with badges to come for me, to take me out of the treatment program and put me behind bars.

If that were to happen, it might be a very long time before I came out again. As I understand it, during my lost six months, I may have accidentally burned down much of Portland.

And so we meet every day, in groups, and go around and tell our stories. And, when it comes time for me to talk, I do the only thing I can.

I lie.

As it turns out, I'm great at it. Perhaps it comes from these months of listening to other addicts talk. After hearing enough stories of the degraded life of an addict, you sort of get familiar with it as a genre of storytelling. Frankly, most of the other patients have rather boring stories. Some robbed their parents, and confessing it brings guilty weeping from them, but yawns from me. Some had joint checking accounts with their spouses, and emptied them, and left their husband or wife in terrible debt. It's hard for me to stay awake for these stories; I have found myself doing a trick I did in high school, propping my eyes open with my fingers. Inevitably, a few people killed one or two others, which sounds like it would make for a great story, but doesn't. All drunk driving tales are identical, and, if you've heard one, you've heard them all. You listen, hoping to hear that an unusually large number of people were killed, or that somebody unexpected was killed. Nope. It's almost always a young couple, sometimes with a child. Yes, I appreciate the pathos, but it just gets so redundant to hear story after story like this.

So I decided to spruce up my stories. I figured, why not? Whatever happened to me was pretty weird, I know that. My fibs might not be the exact adventures I had during six months of Angel Dust, but they accurate reflect the lunacy that must have occurred. After all, I set fire to Portland.

I consider it an improv exercise. Every day, when I stand to tell my lie, I have promised myself that I will not repeat anything I have already said. This makes it very challenging, but also very rewarding. So, if one day I insist that I worked for an illegal dentistry clinic for coke money, pulling healthy teeth from hapless immigrants and selling them to dentally challenged movie actors from Canada and Great Britain -- well, that's the last time I can tell that story. And if I claim that I got bored with mainstream drugs and started to mainline the crushed bones of endangered animals, which caused me to take on certain bestial characteristics, including a tendency to hunt my own food and eat it raw -- well, once told, that story is done.

These stories have made me very popular. I can see it in the eyes of my fellow patients. They slump in their chairs and nod solemnly when others tell their stories. When I rise to speak, they sit up and lean forward in their seats, staring at me with wide, greedy eyes and licking their lips. It's not just the patients, either. I've noticed, over the past few weeks, a growing audience of health care professionals. They come in quietly and line the back wall, and they watch me in mute fascination, some taking notes.

Word got back to me yesterday that there might be a literary agent in the group today. Other inmates whispered the news to me over breakfast, congratulating me. Everybody knows what this means. It's my ticket to the big show: A book deal, a reading tour, and perhaps, if I make enough of a splash, an appearance on Oprah.

As it happens, I have a hell of a story planned for today. It came to me last night as I slept in my bunk, and I woke laughing with pleasure. Sometimes you get an idea for a story and you know it to be good. No, it's more than good. It's great. If I can tell it right, it will be sublime. It's the sort of story that you can't wait to tell, and I've been tempted to share some of the broader details with my fellow patience while we do our morning exercises. But, as much as part of me wants to tell the story, I have resisted. I don't want to diminish the telling of the story by spoiling part of it for my audience, or for myself.

It is 2pm now, time for our afternoon meeting. It is packed. Most everybody is standing, although has been roped into scouring the building for additional seating. My group, which usually consists of nine other patience, now seems made up of every patient in the clinic. The scattering of medical professionals against the back wall has swelled to several dozen, two with video cameras. And there, in the middle of the room, seated on a rusted green folding chair, is the literary agent. He is young and lean, dressed in an angular black suit with four buttons up the front and a striped, almost collegiate tie. He sits with a leather-bound notepad in his lap, and he has a cell phone in his other hand, at the ready.

My case agent sees me and rises, raising his hands, and the room falls silent. "Usually, we would begin this in a rather formal way," he says. "A patient would say a prayer, and we would all repeat some positive affirmations, and we would take our turns telling our stories. But does anybody want that today?"

The assembled listeners shake their heads. My caseworker cocks his head. "I didn't hear you," he says.

"No," a few of the assembled say.

"You're going to have to be louder," my caseworker says. "Do we want all that nonsense, or do we just want to get down to business?"

"Business!" the assembled respond.

My caseworker lifts an open hand to his ear. "What?" he asks.

"Business!" the assembled respond.

"ONE MORE TIME!" my caseworker demands.

"BUSINESS!" the assembled shout, stamping their feet and clapping their hands.

"Well then," me caseworker says, "and without further ado, I give you the hardest case we ever had. A man who was already legend when he came here. A man who lived a life of such misery and degradation that I shudder to think of it. You know the man I speak of. He is a man who can snort a mountain of cocaine, fight three wild wolves to the death, and shoot 20 needles of cocaine to top it off. He's the man who is so mean that he once shot his dealer to death for keeping him waiting. He is a man so dangerous that he was the FBI number one, number two, and number three Most Wanted Man in America -- all at the same time. I give you the living legend, the terror of Portland, the Rocket Fuel Man -- BUNNY SPARBER!"

With his words, the room bursts into thunderous applause, and I walk to the center of it. I raise my hands, and the room fall silent.

"My name is Bunny Sparber," I say, "and I am an addict."

"HELLO BUNNY," comes the response from the assembled.

"You ever have a craving so bad you thought you would die from it?" I ask. The assembled nod, knowingly. I continue: "I mean, you think you might actually die from it. It's just life or death, and that's all. If any of you know what I am talking about, raise your hand."

All the hands in the room, rise. I nod, grinning. "I know you do," I say. "People in the world think they know what want is. They want a boyfriend, or they want a compliment, or they want to buy a new car, and they think they know what it means to want. But they don't, do they?"

Heads shake. A few cry out no.

"No they don't. Because it's not a need unless you are willing to kill or die for it, is it?" I ask.

"Hell no!" one man responds.

"Who hear has ever thought they might die if they couldn't get another drink?" I ask. Hands rise. "And who here has ever been ready to kill for cocaine?" I ask. More hands rise.

"Well, you know me," I say. "You believe me when I tell you that a barrel full of alcohol don't get me drunk?"

Heads nod.

"And if I tell you I could snort a million dollars of cocaine, and it wouldn't get me high, would you call me a liar?" I ask.

Heads shake.

"So when I say I have a need so bad that I would kill or die for it, you're going to know it's a pretty big need, don't you?" I ask.

Heads nod. Eyes shine, excited. One man in the front row, an emaciated older fellow with oversized dentures, is positively shaking in excitement. "What?" he asks in a small voice. "What do you need."

"War," I say.

The room falls silent. People shift in their seats, uncomfortable. But I knew they would react this way.

"I tell you this," I say, "you don't know a high until you've breathed the smoke of the atom bomb. You take it into you, and you feel it settle into your blood and wrap itself around your bones. And it courses through you, right up to your frontal lobe, and there it goes off with a burst of pleasure that feels just like dying. And most people who feel that, well, I guess they do die from it. The pleasure just goes right through them, and turns them into dust, and nobody will ever know from them that their last second on earth was the most pleasurable they have ever experienced."

A voice in the back snorts. "Are you saying it feels good to get killed by an atom bomb?" he calls out.

"No, I'm not saying that," I say. "I'm not saying it feels good. I'm saying if there is a heaven, then that is what it feels like. I am saying paradise is one massive nuclear explosion that goes on and on and on forever. I'm saying that blast goes right into you and shakes every atom of your body in sympathetic pleasure, and you think it's just going to shake you to pieces. And usually it does. Usually it does."

I stare out at the assembled patience, who star back at me, eyes raised, fascinated.

"But there was a soldier at the first dropping of the atom bomb. A fellow named Private Reginald Groves. He was a witness to the first atomic explosion, the Trinity site in New Mexico. Back then, in 1945, they didn't know how big an explosion would come out of the atom bomb. They guessed, but they guessed wrong. This is a story that is not told in history books, but when they broke the atom at Trinity, 300 American soldier were killed in the blast. Just eaten up by it. Too close. Other were further away, and they survived, but they were too far away too experience anything but a flash of light and the concussion of a shock wave.

"But Reginald Grove was neither too near, and so he didn't die, not too far away. And so, the next day, they found Reginald Grove, breaking into the hangar at the White Sands Missile Range. And Reginald Grove was mad. He stabbed to guards with his army issue knife before they got him into custody. For months, he couldn't explain what had happened to him, but he repeatedly tried to escape the custody of the Military Police. One day he did it. They found him hitchiking toward the Missile Base. When they were arresting him, somebody got too eager and hit him in the head, and Reginald Groves fell into a coma.

"After America dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were strange stories. None of these have ever been printed, but American servicemen who went to Japan after their surrender told haunting tales of hollow-eyed men who would approach them outside bars, begging them to drop another bomb. When the Russians got their own bomb, American intelligence heard similar stories. A nuclear scientist from Moscow who defected to the US told of ex-servicemen who had witnessed Russian atomic testing, and had gone mad from it -- a group of them had stolen a small atomic device and set it off in the hills near Tver, killing themselves and burning the woods for a hundred miles.

"It kept happening. When the Bikini Atoll was bombed, fishermen leaped from their boats and swam in the direction of the islands, drowning themselves. When India developed it's atomic program, a new monster entered popular mythology, a hollow-eyed, glowing man who wanders the streets in Pokhran, claiming that he has seen the Buddha and known nirvana. Anywhere where atom bombs have been tested, there are these men. Officially, they don't exist, but the U.S. government has a code word for them: fission winos. You'll meet one now and again, usually in a hospital, usually under military guard, usually dying, and they'll tell you that if they could get their hands on a nuclear bomb, they would set it off without a moment's hesitation. And they fumble for words to describe the pleasure of it, and words fail, but you can hear it in the way their voice shakes, and their eyes roll, and their hands grasp. There is no high like an apocalypse high.

"There's a reason we've never heard about this, too. Because if the general public knew, then no missile silo and no atomic power plant would be safe. They would have to be heavily guarded, at all times, just too keep people away. People like me. Because if I can set off one of them bombs, you had better believe I will. I've already tried once, and it burned down half of Portland. I'll keep trying, too. It's a high I will both kill and die for."

I stop talking. I stare at the audience. They stare back. My case worker looks at me, astonished. "How do you know about this?" he asks.

"Reginald Grove was my grandfather," I say.

He nods soberly. He turns to the room and waves his hand at the door. The crowd rises and exits in silence. All but for the literary agent. He remains seated, his cell phone open, considering it. I cross to him, and he looks up at me warily.

"Before I make this call, I have to ask you," he says. "Is there one word of truth to that story you just told?"

"Does it make a difference?" I ask.

He dials a number, listens to it ring. He looks up at me again.

"You think you're ready for Oprah?" he asks.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

WRITER AND PERFORMER JOSEPH SCRIMSHAW discusses his new show, Tragedy of You, playing Fridays, April 3 through 24 at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. The show will be a complete Shakespearean tragedy, based on details from the life of an audience member, with all the roles played by Scrimshaw. Assistance in this video comes from Overheard in Minneapolis's Ang.

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I'VE BEEN DOING the Cookie and Shake diet for a few weeks now, and I think I have lost exactly 1/2 pounds -- I am at 178.5 now. That's a little disappointing, but it may just be a typical plateau in dieting, and it may be because I've been eating food that's a little junkier now and then, such as a helping of waffle fries I had yesterday.

I'll give this diet two more weeks, and will be really rigorous about it during that time, and see what happens. If my weight loss remains at the slow crawl it's currently in, I will change up my diet again.

At least I have actually lost a little. I was convinced that I was going to get on the scale today and discover that I had gained weight. It may be that when you're dieting, you're going to wind up with a hint of body dysmorphic disorder -- or it may be that I am unique in this. But I have managed to go from seeing myself as svelt to chubby again in just a few days. The initial amazement that I didn't have quite so much stomach as I one did has been replaced by a recognition of the roundness that I still have. At the top end of the normal BMI, there's still a fair amount of body fat; I have not quite gotten to the silhouette of alarming vertical lines that is my goal.

When I drop another 20 pounds, and am halfway to my goal, it will be interesting to see how I see myself. I suspect it will depend on the day. Some days, I'll look in the mirror and think, wow, getting thin. Some days I'll look in the mirror and say, hey, look at that stomach. And that's all right. I'm not really concerned about how I perceive myself when I look in the mirror, as the brain is a notorious liar about these things. You should never make diet decisions based on whether you feel like you look fat, or if you feel that you don't look fat, because there's the possibility for a lot of self-deception there, with perfectly healthy people insisting that they are grotesquely bloated, and hideously out-of-shape people mistaking themselves for Adonises. Nah, I'm trusting the Body Mass Index, rough measure though it may be; at least it will never try to trick me, like my crafty brain does.

More Rock Star Skinny.

IMPALER, the 2007 documentary about ex-wrester and self-declared Satanic vampire Jonathon Sharkey's bizarre 2006 campaign for Governor of Minnesota (now available on Hulu), is a rough piece of documentary filmmaking. I don't know precisely what director W. Tray White's background is in filmmaking, although this was his feature-length debut. I do know from interviews that he stumbled across Sharkey's Web page on the Internet, called him very late at night with the intention of possibly pranking him, and, after a long talk, decided to do a documentary about the man.

So let's dispense with the limitations of the film, as they are both legion and don't matter. It's not well filmed -- unless the camera gets very close to whoever is talking, it's often hard to figure out who the subject of the shot is, and there seems to have been no effort to light anybody at all, so almost every scene that isn't in blazing sunlight gets lost in murky shadows. The things feels edited with a minimal amount of art, and so scenes feel jumbled and their narrative points uncertain. Director White is a constant presence in the film, sometimes asking questions off camera, sometimes appearing on camera to do interviews, and sometimes actually appearing in scenes, interacting with his subjects; when you do this, you make the director a character in the narrative, but White never establishes who he is or shows much consideration for the way his presence might be effecting the film. This is naive, make-it-up-as-you-go-along filmmaking at its rawest.

But, oh my God, does it work. It helps that Jonathon Starkey is obviously a man who is greedy for attention, so White had no trouble getting access to his subject, and Sharkey often appears desperate for screentime -- even when he's not being directly interviewed, he can often be seen lurking in the background, pretending to take care of bits of business.

The film begins who two stories, one of them mostly fabricated. The true one is of Sharkey's life in Princeton, Minnesota, a little hamlet from which he decided to launch his Gubernatorial run and where he lived with his girlfriend, a sweetly dense woman Julie, who is almost instantly fired from her job as a bus driver when Sharkey outs her as a pagan, and who dreamily tells White that her dream job would be to buy her own school bus and start driving kids again. But this is Sharkey's show, and Sharkey has a story to tell, and it's a ridiculous one. He earnestly makes claims that seem indefensible, such as insisting he has a Ph.D. in Political Science (no evidence of this has ever been offered), and that he is descended from a long line of vampires stretching all the way back to Transylvania. He is a masterpiece of self-delusion, simultaneously complaining that interviewers focus too much on his Satanism and vampirism, but then going on talk shows and earnestly insisting that one of his main planks will be to find terrorists and impale them, and, further, he wants to impale George W. Bush.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a little self-invention. If you met Sharkey in a bar, you might find him a disarming oddball, the sort of guy who thinks it is super-badass to brag of how he drinks his girlfriend's blood, and, if she's nearby, will actually take a nip at her to prove it. Sharkey was a wrestler (although, to hear fellow wrestlers discuss it, not a very good one), and wrestlers are prone to creating outrageous, oversized personas, and that's part of their charm. But the fact that Sharkey honestly thought he could march into professional politics like a bragging heel in the squared circle and be treated as anything other than an entertaining novelty -- well, that beggars imagination.

Technical roughness aside, Sharkey's capacity for self-aggrandizement and self-deception are at the heart of this film, and White is unsparing about looking at them, beginning with a protracted and wince-inducing discussion between Sharkey and his girlfriend about whether or not criminals would need to go through the legal system before he can impale them. It's a shockingly stupid discussion, but an earnest one, and obviously not the first time the two have had the discussion. Worse still, the talk happens in a car on the way to an interview with Tucker Carlson, who proceeds to treat Sharkey as a figure of fun. And here we have the fundamental narrative of the film: Sharkey is weird enough to attract derisive attention from the real media, and delusional enough to mistake it for serious attention of his candidacy.

This is, in its way, a perfect story for an amateur filmmaker. Sometimes you have to really dig to make a story from historical documents, finding a narrative hidden in thousands of feet of film. Sharkey's story wrote itself. Because, as it turns out, Sharkey was more naive about entering politics than anybody could have imagined. His past had a dark side, including one, and perhaps several, instances of him faking his deaths, and multiple arrest warrants in other states, and it's just astounding that it never occurred to him that if he got some national attention, these stories might emerge, and men with badges might come looking for him. White follows the stories as they appear, talking with people who knew Sharkey in some of his former incarnations (including a cross-dressing persona that Sharkey reportedly affected for a while, and appeared in public as, but refused to admit to). There are hints of brutality here and there, from Sharkey's own experiences as an abused child to harrowing stories of him terrorizing his own children, one of whom manages the heartbreaking task of being both ashamed of his father and missing the man terribly.

Technical limitations aside, White did one thing absolutely right in this film -- he was fearless about ferreting out the truth, or, at least, the conflicting stories about Jonathon Sharkey. I'm sure if Sharkey had been able to dictate what sort of film he wanted about him, the results might have looked like a particularly cheap heavy metal music video, but White dug deeper and found a deeply disquieting story of an unusual sort of meatheaded hubris; this is amateur journalism done right, where relentless, curious digging turns up a story more complicated and interesting than the one the subject of the story might have wanted told. It's nice to think that just about anybody, given a compelling subject and a healthy curiosity, might be able to make a documentary this engrossing. Impaler demonstrates that we can't all be Governor, but, perhaps, we can all be journalists.

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