I grew up in the Jackass Capital of the World, no joke---Columbia, Tennessee. My mother was a rabid fundamentalist who declared war on everything heathen, from Halloween to the Smurfs. Everything had to be about Jesus---if I wanted to do karate, I had to do Karate For Christ. Then, one day, I had my first obsessive-compulsive attack and stopped wearing underwear and she freaked out. Then all the kids at school found out. It's actually an extremely colorful short story with tons of weird details. Like my next-door neighbor never left her bed, accept once, to try to steal 85 million dollars from the Saturn plant. I knew about this because she was the sole client of my pet-sitting service---she paid me five dollars a week to scoop the crap out of her litter boxes (she had tons of cats). Also, the vice-principal of my sister's school was accused of sexual harassment, fired, kicked out of his church and he kidnapped his wife and killed the both of them with a shotgun. He was a friend of my mother's. Hell, I was driven to and from school by a bus that broke down every other day, or burst into flames, driven by a 76-year-old man (he was engaged to a 42-year-old woman) and we had to scream for him to stop at every stop sign or he'd go right into traffic---he went over speedbumps at 50 miles an hour. There was this weird Asian cult who thought the town was the center of the universe and one day God would come down in a silvery, cigar-shaped spaceship. I've also done a lot of other interesting stuff I could throw in---I met the love of my life on the Internet and flew to Minneapolis to live with her, having never even seen her face before, and have since had lots of adventures---like appearing fully nude in an independent film. So, I don't know, I think this stuff is colorful, but I'm very unsure of myself, so I always need to be constantly asking for, you know, approval. If it's bad, I'd like to know that, too. And it's not that I don't have tons of fictional ideas down. I just think autobiography should be the bedrock of all good fiction.
