"If that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!"

The anti-Semitic Elmo is named Adam Sandler.

I was in a band that had a smidgen of success, playing at CBGBs and in Asbury Park and traveling around the country in a minivan for some shows.

We played from 1991-1995, often at the drummer's house, where his fat little brother would play Nintendo all day long as we goofed on him. After the band kind of split up, the drummer started DJing drum and bass and I became his MC for a few years, including doing a show on Princeton University Radio called Bassquake.

I got married, he and his girlfriend came to our wedding, then we kind of drifted apart. We'd talk over the years here and there, he and his wife got married and had some kids, I had a kid, and then we started talking on facebook.

Then he posted a link to this. It's a company he started with his brother, the one who'd play Nintendo during all of our band practices.

It certainly has been the most bizarre thing to ever happen to me in my entire life.

WTF doesn't cut it. OMG HFS WTH LOL PCP LSD BATHSALTS don't cut it, either.

I mean what do you do, when you suddenly find out the drummer in your band led a secret life as an international conglomerate multimillionaire CEO ?

Brothers Dinesh and...Josh?

Josh ain't short and fat anymore.

Their parents were Christian. Their cousins actually went to my church when I was a kid.

I've told this story here before. When I was seventeen my best friend suddenly disappeared from my life — I was later told he was dead. Then, six years ago, I discovered he was a British MP.

I assumed it was short for Rogan Josh.

A beauty pageant. For, er, Holocaust survivors.

Are you sure that wasn't a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode ?

WOW.

Amor de Cosmos wrote:


That's awesome. You should turn that idea into a novel.

A funny thing happened at my last session with my shrink. He asked me about my marriage, and as I started recounting the chain of events from the very beginning, bullet-point stylee for brevity (it's only a 50-minute session), I was listening to myself and thinking, "WTF?" My life story sounds totally made up.

In some ways it probably is.

Memories are personal myths more than recollections of facts. We distil, distort and embroider events out of all recognition. It's not intentional, or not always anyway, it's how we draw meaning and make sense of our life, or at least give it narrative cohesion.

So I wasn't a crime-fighting hero with a bat fixation hiding behind the facade of a rich, feckless playboy?

Figures.

Amor de Cosmos wrote:


The reality of my past is more bizarre than anything I could fabricate. I think the part where I started thinking "WTF?" was when I heard myself say: "...so he kidnapped me, and for three months my parents had no idea if I was dead or alive. Then he agreed to let me go, but only if I gave him time to get away so that the authorities couldn't trace his whereabouts by back-tracking mine. So I attended a week long jewelry repair and stone setting course in Selma, Alabama..."

Seriously?

Coo-er. That sounds terrifying.

No I didn't mean you made it up, — myths aren't made up, they're just facts when they're drunk. But we all rearrange, truncate and emphasise our past when recollecting it. We have to, we don't have the time to do otherwise. For example, you just described something in a paragraph that took three months. To do that takes serious (unconscious) editing.

I think I should have been terrified at the time, but I wasn't. 23-year olds are invincible.

Has anyone told that lass in the last photo that she's forgotten to put her trews on?

All right, JV, I'll bite: WTF?

I didn't share the story about the 34-year old grandmother and her 22-year old boyfriend being arrested after her toddler grandson swallowed cocaine, because it was too depressing.

And surprisingly, not in Florida (it was in Georgia).