The story of my life is a remake of an obscure Danish film whose title translates roughly to “The Cow Comes Home At Midnight.”
The story of my life is the story of America writ large. It is meant as a cautionary tale about the perils of caution itself.
No: it’s neither of those things, really.
The story of my life walks into a bar. Someone else’s story is already sitting on its favorite barstool. “Story of my life,” mutters the story of my life. Then, it takes a wild swing at the other story, falls flat on its face, and is escorted out by bouncers. Later, the same story will be told in at least eleven different ways, Rashomon-style, by the bystanders who witnessed it.
The story of my life does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s also kind of a late-middle that’s still mostly TBD. I’m currently working on that part with my team, which includes a therapist, a life coach, and an Oscar-winner for special effects. This is the part of my life story I’m most immediately concerned with, that I desperately want to get right. If I don’t, expect the critics to absolutely savage me.
The story of my life could easily be recast as a sea shanty performed by a grizzled Alaskan salmon fisherman waiting in line at the DMV. It could be reimagined as a quest for the Holy Grail which can only be completed via two-factor authentication. The story of my life may soon be available as an NFT, though I continue to have no clue what that is.
The story of my life is a tale of justice delayed, and possibly, justice denied. Oh, no wait, sorry—that’s not my story at all, that’s the story of someone far more unlucky, but far more deserving, and far more determined, than me.
Every day I rewrite the story of my life. I try to remove the wordiness and the chaff. I don’t need both wordiness and chaff. Let’s ditch the wordiness, and leave the chaff in place. Thank god we’ve settled that, without suffering from too much wordiness, or too much chaff.
I meet her one fine evening at a party. The stakes feel weirdly high: I go to parties so rarely nowadays, and the opportunities to meet genuinely interesting people in a social setting are few and far between. I start to tell her the story of my life. She stops me barely a minute in: she says she’s heard this story before. I say that’s impossible: every life is unique, like a snowflake, or a fingerprint. Then, she asks me to imagine a world where snowflakes can get fingerprinted. She tells me there’s an administrative building designated for the fingerprinting of snowflakes, that it lives in the sky, and is staffed entirely by sentient clouds. She spins this story out, like thread, drunkenly, convincingly. This is when I know that I like her. We talk for hours and hours, drinking and laughing, the drinks and the laughs distorting our sense of time. We go outside to make angels in the snow, and in that moment, we are children and middle-aged people simultaneously. I feel a connection I haven’t felt in what seems like a lifetime—but she has another life, it turns out, in another city, with another person. She is simply someone who could have been, should have been, something more to me—if only the timing had been right.
But the timing is so, so rarely right.
Story of my life.
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