I know who I am, do you know who you are?
I understand wanting to make sure lines are formatted correctly, etc. I remember having this problem before when I wanted to publish some work. But I get overwhelmed with trying to go from application to application and saving attached files so I can find them again. Screwed up spacing and scrambled letters are no good! That's for sure!
I'm here to tell you who I am. I wish I knew. I'll do the best I can to fill you in with a little bit about me but keep in mind that I'm iffy about all of it. My memory is probably fading right along with my sense of autonomy.
I was born in 1965 on one of the highways leading a suburb of New York City, not quite yet near upstate New York, but instead, much closer to Hoboken, New Jersey. No wait. That wasn't me. That was a friend of mine who I haven't seen in about 15 years. Lemme think.
Oh yeah. I was born in 1971 in the back seat of my mother's car. Her husband at the time was rushing her to the hospital because I wanted to come out so bad but her body wasn't able to handle the darn experience slowly enough. He wasn't my father. He was just trying to help. But they didn't make it. This was in the foothills of the Ozarks somewhere. They never told me the exact location but I know her husband owned a Porsche. A red one. 1968. He had rebuilt it starting from a Volkswagon engine but he didn't do the body work himself. He paid his cousin, Joel, to do it. The car had been involved in an accident prior to that and was somewhat of a collectors item, especially because some famous celebrity who had a reputation for floozing around with other famous celebreties used to own the vehicle but I can't remember her name, though she was well known for being a not-so-well-known disco singer at the time.
No wait! That's a lie. I'm sorry. I graduated from high school in 1971. That's the truth, really. I'm old. But not as old as my older sisters. They graduated several years earlier than I did but they weren't born in the back of a famous Porsche like that and their father wasn't my mother's husband either, so I'm one up on them.
OK. So, now I'm on a roll. Let's start from the beginning, shall we? (Don't you hate it when people say "shall we" when they really mean, "shall I?" or "shan't I?" or "should I?" or something else entirely but they have no ability to articulate it? I do. But what I hate worse is when they say something which is quite articulate but means so little that they even admit they don't know what it means. Like now, for instance.) *whew*
So, it was 19 hundred and some year back when I was born and Mom, she was a fashion plate of sorts. Plus, she was really married to my father, not the other guy in the Porsche who was driving her to deliver a baby because I made that up. No, that's not what happened at all to my Mom. It might have happened to that other guy's wife or something but I wasn't there so I truly have no right to report it like this. But I am anyway, just to get to the point.
My Mom... well, she wore platform shoes and hats and worked at a movie theater selling tickets. Her stockings had seams up the back. She wanted to be a journalist, a photo-journalist, actually, but she didn't own a camera so she never made it in that field, though she tended to memorize the pictures she wanted to take but wasn't able to take and tell me about them.
No wait! That was my grandmother. Or yours. I never can get those two ladies straight. Did your grandmother wear stockings with seams up the back? Black ones? Maybe that was my sister-in-law's grandmother – the sister of my first husband who worked as an agent for the government. Not our government. I mean, not the government of the U S of A, but the some other governement somewhere in the world but I don't know which one because he didn't have the opportunity to tell me since it was considered Top Secret at the time.
Oh geez... I don't have this right yet. That wasn't the sister of my first husband, that was the sister of my second husband who swore to me over and over that he didn't have a sister to begin with because he was bound by laws which he refused to explain since they weren't the laws of this country but they were the laws, instead, of his parent's country where he was born. He called that country "the old country."
Hold on. I'm getting confused here. Let me think for a minute.
I tell you what. It's going to take more than a minute because it's already after 3AM and I haven't finished remembering about my ex-husband's family (neither of them) and which car I wasn't in when I wasn't born out of the loins of a lady who wasn't my mother after all.
The path and physics of telling a story like this is way beyond me. I need to do an analysis. I mean, I need an analyist. Or a computer programmer. Or an adminstrative assistant, at the very least. I was considering hiring an editor to help me sort through my stories so that I could create a memoir but I couldn't afford to pay someone who would work so cheap. Y'know? I'm sure you do.
This has been a helluva journey and I'm not so sure how I ended up here but I tell you what, – (mark my words on a chalk board somewhere so you can be sure to erase them later) ... this is no picnic! I mean, just IMAGINE it!
Imagine you were born, just like me, at some point in time to parents of no particular distinct characteristics, even though you remembered them quite well from the variety of photographs you had saved through the years and then you became ME, just like that, some 30 or 40 years later and bing bam boom, some dude asks you who you are and what you are and why you are and you have to try to explain it! I mean, just imagine that if you would, ok?
Alright. I give up. I'll tell you the truth. I'm a parapalegic 23-year-old graduate student at MIT studying physics and astronomy. I met a man on the internet and he promised me the world and decided to take me into his humble abode and so I traveled all the way across country only to find out he had ulterior motives. Thank goodness! And that's where I live now – along with my second ex-husband's first secretary's cat named Shelly and two totally indescript budgies, one with blue markings and one with green and black, and Wink, my cat who I've had for 14 years who disappeared last week and never came back.
I figure it's all cosmic material. I'm a physics major, remember? *sigh*
I haven't written that many words in months. As I was writing this, I cracked myself up and threw tomatoes and fruit and veggies at me all at the same time, though I am well aware that tomatoes are both fruit and vegetable, (though fruit is legal and vegetable is legal, too, no matter how you look at the history of the definitions or terms), but I didn't need to bombard myself like that just to get me off the stage.
Actually, I'm Doreen. My real last name is not Peri. It is much longer than that but I'm seriously considering legally changing it to Peri since I am around and about it. I am a deft explorer, a rabid questioner, a make-believe lover of earth and air, a cabaret dancer, a theatrical impersonator, a make-shift music-maker and a dolt, attempting to find my way from one dot to the next on a universal pad of paper, wondering why they couldn't get water to the people on day two instead of day 6 or if it got there at all....
And who are YOU? Tell me. I truly do want to know.
'Splain it to me, lucy! 
Seriously, though, I am pleased you were entertained by my whimsy. 
