And Now, The Fabtabulous Truth (and one lie) Revealed!!!

Petlets, it's time to reveal the truth (and one lie) about Fireblossom! You'll recall that in my post Fete Me Baby I listed five statements about myself as part of Sioux's Memetastic Meme. Four were true and one was a big whopping doozy of a lie. Did you guess which one was not true?

1. I said I sleep with a night light. True. I didn't until about the age of thirty. Then I started having trouble with something called night terrors, which differ from nightmares. They usually happen to children (I always have to be different, as my mother has been known to bitterly complain), and they usually happen within an hour of falling asleep. They don't have a storyline...just a shadow or some other vague threatening presence takes the mortal terror from zero to 90 in about three seconds. They involve physical thrashing and screaming and all sorts of neat stuff like that. Anyway, I discovered that a little bit of light where I sleep prevents them. So, let there be light. A night light.

2. I said I can't sleep in a silent environment, either. True. I use a white noise machine. I prefer the "waterfall" setting. I lurv my little white noise machine! It's either that or run the dryer all night every night. The noise machine is cheaper! As a child, my parents took me with them to the Great Smoky Mountains one year. We stayed at a place in Gatlinburg that was right on a rocky stream. I never slept better in my life. All night long, it seemed to go shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I need something like that to stop my brain from thinking and keeping me awake.

3. I claimed that I lived in San Antonio, Texas, for six years and never owned a car. True. I used public transportation. I was your friendly neighborhood stone-broke artistic type. I spent most of my twenties doing two things...drinking and studying, though never at the same time. I self-educated. I worked part time to keep body and soul together, and used all that extra time to read everything I felt a young wannabe writer should read. I read Kerouac, Brautigan, Burroughs, Dreiser, Hardy, Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Christina Rossetti, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kesey, Vonnegut, everything I thought I might learn something from. And guess what? I couldn't have spent my time in a better way. I learned how the masterful use words, how the brilliant think about things, and how the greatest hearts express themselves. And I learned a great honking wealth of wildly diverse trivia. 

4. I said that, the summer I was eleven, my middle brother got married. True. And that the best man stayed at our house. Also true. I said that I didn't like the girl my brother was marrying. True true true. I went on to say that I hid the best man's shoes, thinking that then the ceremony would have to be postponed. Did you pick that out as the lie? Because, if you did, you were right.  I never hid his shoes.

5. And finally, I said 

I don't care if I'm stange, I ain't gonna change

And I don't give a damn about my bad reputation!

True!

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