The Los Angeles River from the 101 freeway, Midnight, 1-28-08
I've decided to try to write a book without classes. If a publisher wants it, they can clean it up any way they want. Long as they pay me.
I have a story to tell. Maybe it’s important to write it. Maybe it will help someone. Or maybe I just need to vomit it all up once and for all into the ether, just to help me. A lot of the people involved will tell you how I’m really good at that, doing what’s best for me no matter what the consequences, but it isn’t true. Most of them are the people who did what was best for them and I am the consequences.
They’ll tell you I remember it all wrong, even the parts they weren’t there for. They’ll tell you about a child’s memory, or how terrible emotion can color a memory and maybe all that’s true. I know that’s true. Nonetheless, of the five or six versions of the truth there are, one for each of us, I know mine is the truest one. I‘m the unflinching one and I've never been willing to rewrite the history in order to stay in favor. They had to compromise, I wouldn't. I remember everything the way it really was.
In any case, they won’t have much to bitch about. If I do this right, most of them will never know I wrote it. I won’t tell them it got published, not even to rub their noses in it. This is mine – let them write their own story. This is mine and there are people I love that I want to protect from what happened to me and what happens when you tell the truth.
