This update is linked to Derek Sivers’ “What I’m Doing Now” project https://nownownow.com/p/b2td). 

WHAT I'M DOING NOW

I know I said I never wanted to write another book as long as I lived after The Art of Looking at Art https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538133729/The-Art-of-Looking-at-Art, but my life story is just too damned interesting not to tell it to the world. So I'm working on my autobiography. Here's the opening:

 The story you were about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect me from lawsuits. 

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My life story makes Augusten Burroughs’ 2002 hard-to-believe-it’s-true-cuz-maybe-it’s-not memoir Running With Scissors look like a summer beach read. And it’s not one bit exaggerated. That I’m still here at all, much less that some people somehow (including a few members of my own dear family, who should know better) find reason to pick fights with me or knock me down a peg because they have some bizarrely skewed perception of me is beyond my comprehension. I’ve been to Hell and back so many times I have frequent flyer miles, and around the block more times than a goddamn Good Humor truck. Maybe it’s the fact that I always somehow manage to clean up all bright and shiny that throws them off? In all likelihood, in the case of my family anyway, it was their illness speaking, not them. I have yet to figure that one out…

While we're on the topic of  bright and shiny, my first memory dates back to the age of two or three, meaning 1959 or ’60. Our family had just moved into our brand new, six-room ranch house, complete with front and back lawn, three trees, four azalea bushes, and driveway.

My mother was wearing a housedress, with her hair bobby-pinned up—very Alice Kramden. I was sitting on the floor staring up at her as she moved a gleaming silver thing back and forth over my father’s shirts and even the sheets she had draped over a long skinny table. I was entranced, and can remember clearly how surprised and thrilled I was whenever a big, billowing cloud of steam would rise from it. My mother always sang when she ironed. She had a beautiful singing voice, and in later years I’ve come to decide that with her voice (and her temperament), she would probably have made a very good opera diva. By and by, the singing would stop, replaced by other, less pleasant forms of vocal expression—but we’ll get to that. At one point, my mother, having gotten every last recalcitrant wrinkle out of whatever garment she’d been working on, set the iron on its back end as she folded her latest triumph. I wanted to touch the silver thing my mother seemed to enjoy so much. Did the pocket watch-like motion of the iron hypnotize me? Was I looking to connect to my mother by coming in contact with this thing that seemingly gave her such pleasure?

I laid my palm squarely on the mirrorlike bottom surface with its two rows of little holes running along the edge. So my earliest memory included a valuable lesson—a lesson that may in fact be the reason this exceedingly painful incident is my earliest memory. Like most of the lessons I’ve received in my life, “Don’t touch the bottoms of hot steam irons” was learned the hard way. For her part, my mother turned whiter than the crisply starched sheets that laid neatly stacked on the kitchen table.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t had my share of laughs. Lots of my relatives, however loonybins, were funny, even if their humor was usually bitter as wormwood. Once I escaped the horrors of the high school pecking order for the more accepting environment of college, I made the shift from “out-crowd pariah” to “character.” The positive reinforcement I got from being outré (by suburban New Jersey standards, anyway) and entertaining (by suburban New Jersey standards, anyway) encouraged me to head further in that direction—indeed, the small but excellent community college I attended was where I took my first classes in art and theater. It goes without saying that the art and theater crowd was also far more entertaining and quirky than most of the kids I went to high school with. As soon as I finished college, inspired by the music of Lou Reed, David Bowie, and the New York Dolls, I made the leap and relocated to the big, bad city, where funny people abound—or used to. (This same music also encouraged me to indulge in a lot of naughty behavior, something else we’ll get to.) In the early 90’s, I fell in with a circle that made lots of money and became quite well known for being funny. Sometimes I think my ability to laugh, no matter how bleak things may appear, and my refusal to let my oppressors come out on top are the two factors that prevented me from throwing myself in a river, like one of my favorite cousins, “Annette,” did. The deadliest thing on Earth is to lose your sense of humor—never mind that your sense of humor can be acidic enough to eat holes through metal…I remember expressing to “Elizabeth,” another of my dozen first cousins, once how great it was that we always maintained that sort of cockeyed optimism, no matter what the circumstances. Her response? “Yeah, well, maybe we’re just a buncha happy idiots, laughin’ away while life passes us by...”