Tuesday, May 01, 2007

I have lived my life so far imagining how I would explain it to a biographer.

I have lived my life so far imagining how I would explain it to a biographer. When Elizabeth Vargas asks me on a 20/20 show, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” I’ll immediately be able to respond, “I decided I was going to be a writer right after I decided that I was going to be a lead singer in Rock band. In fact, it was during the same bus ride that I came to both of these realizations. We had just stopped at a toll both. I’d just finished listening to the Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash Nashville Session CD and I was beginning to listen to the first chapter of the Sun Also Rises audiobook written originally by Ernest Hemingway, but read by someone else. Suddenly, I realized the truth. I realized that I was better than all three of them. Dylan, Cash, and Hemingway and definitely the audiobook reader.”

“Was that the first time in your life that you felt––I don’t want to say, ‘special’––but yes, special? Because you must have felt you had something special if you knew at age 12 that you were going to be greater than Dylan or Hemingway.”

“Dylan and Hemingway, and I didn’t know that I was going to be better. I knew that I was better. I was born better than them. I remember an incident when I was only 9. My father had just caught me up late at night in the kitchen drinking milk straight from the gallon. He scolded me and sent me to bed. The next night I was thirsty again so I went down for some milk. This time as I was drinking straight from the gallon again, I thought, ‘I hope everybody else isn’t doing this.’ I hoped especially hard that the cleaning lady, who came on Wednesdays while I was still at school, didn’t sneak any drinks right from the gallon. She spoke Hungarian, smelled poor people, and listened to boring radio stations. I didn’t want to catch whatever disease she had. Later in my life, I came to understand that she was an immigrant from Budapest and didn’t have any disease other than not being born with the same capabilities with which I had been born. I still drink straight from the gallon, but now there’s no danger of germs because everyone in my house has their own refrigerator. Well, for now the baby shares with the three-year old, but she’ll get hers when she turns two. I mean, if I can afford this luxury then why not? You know? If God wanted us to have to drink milk straight from the cow’s utters, he wouldn’t have invented farmers.”

“That’s an interesting subject. You dealt a lot with your personal struggles with religion in your last book, Dog Poop. That title backwards spells Poop God. Is there a secret meaning to this hidden message?”

“I’ve taken a lot of heat from the fundamentalists that my title, Dog Poop, backwards is actually a command ordering God to poop. I have said once and I will say again now on your show that any combination––besides the printed, left-to-right oriententated version––of the letters in Dog Poop is merely accidental, I mean coincidental. Did you know that you can arrange the letters in your name, Elizabeth Vargas, to spell Algebra Have Zit? Yes, I bet you didn’t. Would it be fair for me to accuse you of ordering the mathematics topic of study to break out with acne? Yes, I bet you’d agree it wouldn’t be fair. No, I don’t want to say anything more about that title or about anything anybody else has said about it.”

“What about your religious struggles? This is your first book to denounce religion. You say that religion is quote ‘too accommodating because it makes people feel better when they feel bad and makes people feel better when they feel good.’ What did you mean by that?”

“I never struggled with religion. When I was six, my parents taught me the importance of prayer. They also taught me that sleeping a good amount every night was healthy and they also made me do math homework in the summer. So naturally, instead of praying every night before going to sleep I recorded myself saying a prayer once. I said, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the lord my soul to keep. Guard me Jesus through the night and give me a kiss in the morning light.’ I switched off the recorder and said, ‘P.S. God, this prayer’s going to have to count as a bunch of prayers for a while if I’m going to get the most sleep I can. Thanks for understanding.’ Then from the next night forward I would just push play on the tape and go to sleep. For a while, maybe a week or so, I would listen to my recorded prayer, but I noticed that I never fell asleep before it finished so I wasn’t actually getting more sleep. I continued playing the tape every night but I just turned the volume knob to nothing beforehand.”

“But what about the quote from Dog Poop? What about religion being too accommodating?”

“That’s true. It is.”

“Explain then.”

“Religion is too accommodating the way that alcohol is too accommodating. People drink it when they’re up and they drink it when they’re down. The only difference is that at church you get a cracker with your booze.”

“Let’s take a break and when we come back we’ll hear about the future of––” and she will smile at the camera and I’ll drink coffee and flirt with the makeup people.

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