mallorys_camera | Dolphins, Hot Sauce, and Boring Introspection (Reply)

Noah told us the true story behind the recent Monterey bay shark attack.

Seems that seconds after the great white took its first bite, a dolphin pod appeared from nowhere, surrounding the injured surfer. This allowed rescuers to get to him.

"Wow," I said. "Doesn't this prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that dolphins are really super-intelligent beings from another planet who came to earth in an aqueous space ship so they could nurture and protect the fragile Homo sapiens species?"

"Well, dolphins are super-intelligent," said Ben. "But no, they were displaying standard dolphin behavior. See, dolphins are a shark's favorite food. So when dolphins see blood in the water they assume it's one of their own and move in to protect."

I like my explanation better.

And from

justpat comes this terrific article on why all you aging boomers need to use hot sauce.

Short version: you either learn to love chili or resign yourself to a subsequent lifetime in which everything tastes like gruel.
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So. Pleasant weekend capped a truly awful week filled with panic attacks, self-loathing, and a long visit with Camus' buddy Meursault on the shadowless beaches of the Maghreb.

The Bozo/Anaconda contretemps really threw me.

I think partly because it's not like I don't understand discretion. I'm very good at keeping secrets. If somebody tells me something in confidence, I don't even hint that I know about that confidence in conversations I may have with others that person & I both may know.

But I'm always getting busted for writing indiscrete things online. My brother-out-law who didn't like the remembrance I wrote about his mother. (Myself, I thought it was an affectionate and humanizing portrait.) Bozo and Anaconda. Let's not even talk about the bad old days on the Well.

Micah once told me long ago that she thought my obsessive journal-keeping was actually a bad thing: "It keeps you from writing anything else."

For a while that wasn't true. I had a moderately successful career as a nonfiction freelancer which I gave up when I took the job at ICM – too much potential for conflict of interest.

But what I've always really wanted to do – I mean we're going back here to earliest childhood what-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up territory – is a fiction writer.

Every memoir – and this is a memoir, written without the benefit of hindsight – is a hybrid of truth and fiction. You don't write about every single thing that happens and when you do write about something, you select the details, hone the dialogue, expand and compress as necessary.

It pleases me to have an audience. Message in a bottle! Narcissist that I am, I actually keep track of the numbers.

How pathetic is that?

Really, if I want an audience, I should write stuff for publication and erase this journal.

I won't, of course. This conduit for processing is more-or-less what keeps me sane.

But I have to rethink the process.

I'm not a blogger. Current events interest me, but I think my opinions about them are irrelevant most of the time. Which means I think other people's opinions are even more irrelevant. No, I'm interested in stories – my story, my narrative but other people's narratives too. They're the only way I can make sense out of it all.

I have to figure out a way to write narrative safely.