The Twilight Zone

Hi All!

Disclaimer: If I am ever legally found certifiable (again) this might be Exhibit A. Therefore, I disclaim the following story as a tall tale worthy of the drunken gibberish of James Frey.

It is all a pigment of my emancipation, or shall I say, exasperation. Exultation?

By the way, even I don't take liberty with sentence structure, capital letters, weird punctuation and dangling metaphors as that fraud...

He wrote a good lie and I confess to being envious and reveling in his disgrace, even though his big fat windy book got a huge sales boost from the "bad" publicity.

Unfortunately, I was only broken into 497,001 little pieces and haven't put them all back together yet. If he was as screwed up as me he couldn't have crapped a tedious 432 page tome out of his nether region.

He , to say the least, exaggerated. A Million Little Pieces? Gimme a break (so to speak) -- I have lived his fact and fiction and then some -- Most of it, anyway.

Most of it, anyway (I did that on purpose). It is true that I have flown on Commercial Airlines after an overpriced Drink or Two at the Lindbergh Bar and the one time I lucked into a First Class upgrade I kept 'em coming like fellow besotted genius Orson Welles.

I didn't Barf and Bleed all over the Stewardesses and Fellow Travelers.

That only happened at Home and in the Hospital and in Bathrooms (I have a deep respect for the poor underpaid hard working illegals who have had to mop up my edgy, creative Worthy of a National Endowment for for the Arts Grant, redecorating jobs. The Toilet can be quite difficult to find at times. Walls, Floors, Waste Baskets -- much easier to hit under the circumstances than that Tiny Porcelain Throne.)

Seriously, you'd be amazed at how much projectile blood and guts can spew out of orifices if you really work at getting to that state. Much worse than anything you'd see on ER.

What was my story? Oh Yeah, sorry about that preface. It just "Came Out." (Get it? Sometimes I just Kill Myself - better to crack myself up with a bad pun than to drive around hunting for a well-constructed bridge abutment).

Get to the POINT! Perhaps this should now be a separate blogentry. This story is totally unrelated, but if you're James Frey, you can make millions by throwing Strunk and White into the recycling bin.

If you read all my posts you are about to find out what I referenced in my pre-dawn missive today.

Here's the setup. I have spent much time with my daughter in the past several days. We shared her Confirmation retreat on Friday, Confirmation and lunch at Fern's on Saturday, Latin High Mass and brunch on Sunday, a trip to Cretin-Derham for high school entry exam on Monday.

Apropos of what?

At as close to 4:00am as it gets, I was startled out of a deep sleep by a demonic scream and a cry for help. I jumped out of bed and went to my daughter's room, only to find her comfortably asleep, no disturbed covers, no pillow askew.

Assuming I had had my own bad dream, I sat on the bed and stroked her hair. A faint smile formed on her lips as I whispered that everything was OK.

I was so wired that I couldn't get back to sleep. Handy for reading e-mail and writing a blogentry (copyright reserved for that Freyish word). Oh, and being awake to make a decent, healthy ham/egg/hash/pepper scramble breakfast for my toaster pastry/sugary oatmeal dependents. They hated it, naturally. Ah well, I tried. Doctored Veggie beef and barley tonight and they are gonna eat it and like it, gosh darn anaway!

My wife got up at 5 and we woke the kids at 6:30. After breakfast, they lay down again for awhile before getting ready for school.

I had related my tale to my wife. She went to Catie's room laid down with her, asking her if she slept ok.

Catie immediately reacted with the story that she had a nightmare about fighting in the Cuban Civil War (?) and that she was out of ammo and was being chased and shot at. Suddenly, just in the nick of time, Dad came to save her and brought her home to her bed.

Wowza.

Totally truthful, which of course, is much more real and strange than Fiction. If I had my life to do over again, I'd prefer to use my imagination. But sometimes reality is comforting.

Cheers!