June 9, part two: fiction (12.5 minutes)

It's all fiction, isn't it? My birth, life, my eventual death? It is only real in the minute second and then it is memory. Written down or told it is fiction.

The people I meet in my life inspire me, engage me. I don't know who I am, don't know my age, my history. I can make something up. Sure, it's all based on the real thing, based on the memories, but it's all fiction.

I remember very clearly living in New London, Texas, having to take my dogs who got mange out into the government-owned field with my father and shoot them. I remember looking down the barrel of a rifle, seeing the eyes of my faithful puppy looking back saying, "What game is this now?!" I have written that story so many times. I know I exaggerated when I wrote there were piles of dogs, but I remember the one. I was in the fourth grade. That was 35 years ago.

Recently, I saw my sister, and since we don't see each other often enough, are not nearly as close as we would like to be, we found ourselves recalling old stories. Tragedies then that make us laugh now. She said, "Oh, no! You've got it wrong. You and Daddy and the dog went off to the woods, you and Daddy walking slow, the dog bouncing along. Then about 30 minutes later, you came back, the dog bouncing along behind you...!"

Even that story is a fiction. My sister doesn't speak like that. I can't capture how she speaks right now. I would have to work on that, would have to maybe call her or write something shortly after the next time I saw her.

I meet people and am surprised at how young they are. I mean people I have connections with. I know they're younger than me, but I'm surprised to find out they're 19 or 20. Usually 24 or 25 is the age I connect with. They usually are surprised that I'm 43 years old. But we are connected somewhere in the middle I guess. These are not "normal" people. These are freaks. Freaks like me.

43 is a fiction, more so than 19 or 20 is a fiction. But sometimes there are special people who defy age. I've always been that type of person, "young for my age" and now "older than my age states." I don't know if there was a time, a year or two, when I actually "acted my age." If so, I'm sure I was making it up, creating something that I believed was that age.

Maybe I was 28. That was an important year for me because I was born on the 28th day of the month and some new agey woman had told me that would be my Golden Year. I had that in mind when it came. I wrote a lot that year, as always, but I think maybe a lot of my writing that year had to do with that, with the actual number being important.

It's all fiction. I don't think I believe anything I just wrote. But if it's entertaining, that's really the important thing. I will put fact aside any time if fiction is more interesting.