It seemed like a good idea at the time. It almost wrecked my life.
As I reached the hoary age of three score and 15 the pressure began to build behind my eyeballs. I could feel the urge growing, starting to crowd the space in my skull usually reserved for odd, discarded, mutated, and immature fantasies that had lived and multiplied in my head like fungi in a damp cellar. Fantasies like being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame based solely on that one diving catch I made in Little League, barhopping with Ray Bradbury, discovering a cure for Bezos, winning an Oscar for set decoration, owning a helicopter (which I would never actually sit in, because I just don’t trust flying machines that can’t glide), becoming fluent in Québécois, owning a Wienerschnitzel franchise, being an Emperor with the power to knit while watching The Americans, and finally, the life goal of not having to shop for my clothes at the Store For Large and Oddly Shaped Men ever again.
Yes, the urge was strong and growing stronger. Retirement only made the siren’s call of the concept more insistent. I began spending long hours online trying to suppress the compulsion by web surfing from YouTube videos about wet-pour versus dry-pour concrete slabs, Uruguayan real estate for digital nomads, the hidden history of the Scythians, how to make Roman garum fish sauce, DIY jet turbine engine repair…on and on…anything to spare my family the agony they would surely suffer if I acted on the insidious idea gradually taking shape in the mist of my mental fog—assembling itself slowly particle by particle; becoming more and more real; transforming slowly from ghostly silhouette into blurred apparition until finally it was a flesh-and-blood, living horror from a Lovecraftian nightmare.
What was this threat to my domestic bliss? What was this threat to my very heritage and my standing among my ancestors, ancient furry forbears and the handsome blonde ones still living in Iowa? What is it that could have such a great, profound impact on so many lives? Simply, I was thinking that I should write a memoir. Yes—I stifled a scream – a memoir!
A memoir is a narrative nonfiction composition based on the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. Therein lay the problems—my memories, and that whole “factual” thing.
As I began to put the project together, I realized my timescale was distorted. Everything in my life had happened in the following categories:
1. Last week
2. A year ago
3. Five years ago
4. A while back
5. Back before JFK got shot.
Those were the only time markers I had to go by. As for “facts,” I started by trying to write about how when I was 5…or 10…or 13…and Rusty Culp’s vicious German shepherd, Otto, mauled me in the backyard (leaving me on the brink of death).
My sister then informed me that Rusty’s dog was a three-legged Pomeranian named Phoebe with no teeth in her lower jaw and I wasn’t bloodied except for the scrape on my knee I got from tripping over the sandbox while I fled the fluffy canine howling in terror.
So, after much reflection—including my now-corrected recall of how many times I “borrowed” mom’s Corvair to visit the Red Dog in Lawrence, and intense negotiations with my family members, including the settlement of the truth concerning certain baking incidents involving expired Crisco—I have decided not to write the darn thing.
And my wife has now returned my car keys.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
