Who'd want to read my life?

                My life would be a fairly boring story. You’d have to pay me to read it, but I’ll do any sort of boring thing for money, because you can usually listen to music while the boring thing gets done. Anyway, I’ve experienced trials and tribulations, like anyone; I’m not economically or socially privileged, and my family is fairly batshit insane; so why wouldn’t my story be interesting? The problem is that none of these tribulations are unique to me, and I don’t expect anyone else to find them interesting. Who doesn’t have pent-up resentment against their parents? Who doesn’t feel lonely and angsty one moment, and joyfully un-lonely (is that a word?) at the next?

                I guess the question this really raises is whether or not the elements of anyone’s life can make for a good story without artistic license. Naturally, I’ve told stories from my life, but my life itself isn’t a good story. If someone asks me to summarize my entire life, they’ll get a long-winded, self-indulgent, unamusing sentence about how I was born somewhere, grew up there, did stuff and then ended up here. But moments from my life have problem to be interesting stories. What makes them interesting is that I embellish elements of it, highlight certain details and omit others. But then it’s not me in the story: it’s a collection of words, used to represent a person in general, to which you apply the perceptual attributes you take from me.

                Want to read a funny story about something funny that happened in my life? I was staying over at a friend’s house watching a movie. She had invited her ex, who was in town for the week, not really expecting him to reply. Sure enough, we heard nothing from him, and after the movie was over I fell asleep on the couch. I awoke a few hours later to some commotion downstairs, where the front door was. Hoping it wasn’t an attempted break-in, I covered myself completely with the covers. I heard footsteps and heavy breathing in the room, they were coming closer, they were at the foot of the couch, someone was stumbling into me so I bolted upright and stared this intruder in the face. I could scarcely make out the features on his thin face, except that he had smeared eyeliner around the upper half. But my friend was next to him, and she quickly said, “Diego, this is Sammy.” The man burped and mumbled hello. I quickly said “hi” and lay back down. That wasn’t the end of it: as I tried falling back asleep, I heard commotion in the bedroom—great, I thought, now I’ll have this to listen to all night. But then I heard a shout from upstairs, “Sammy, don’t you dare go downstairs naked!” I heard the pitter-patter of bare feet on the wooden stairs, and I shut my eyes tightly. I don’t know what he did after that. When I finally fell asleep again, nothing perturbed my sleep until the morning sun awoke me.

                What was so interesting about that? Well, it didn’t happen exactly like that. I picked out the details that made it interesting; I conveniently mis-remembered what actually happened to better fit the “story” of it I have in my mind. But could someone do that with my entire life? Sure, I suppose they could, if they made it all up from scratch.

                Finally, after reading Panorama City, I think part of what makes us want to read a story about someone’s life is to be able to give that life meaning in the end. We sit around wishing we had some teleological drive pushing us somewhere, and we read imaginary lives to convince us that others have it, or that at least they can find it after the fact. If someone were to attempt that with my life, I’d wish them the best of luck.