A loyal reader noted recently that I often tell stories about "my olde friend" or I begin a tale with "a friend of mine was going to the park the other day when.....".
My curious friend noted that I seemed to make most of my "friends" anonymous on my blog and she wondered if there was a reason for that. First, guilty as charged. I guess I should have used the O.J. mugshot here.
I do protect my sources and my friends by making most of my stories generic. I don't want to embarrass anyone in my little blog and quite frankly not everyone wants to be as 'out' as I make myself in my posts. In fact, this blog is a bit of an "outing experiment" for me. I have been protective of myself for most of my life. I don't tell stories about me and I haven't been personally in depth with most of my acquaintances. So for the past three years I have been slowly opening up on these pages.
When we wrote the Matusow book, we struggled with which names to keep and which to change. The obvious "I did some meth with _______" were easy changes, but the girlfriends and strippers were not always so obvious. At some point we got confused and didn't know if Kim was Kim or a pseudonym we had made up. It took us the better part of a three day weekend to get all the names straightened out and the guilty protected.
In my current semi-autobiographical, demi-fictional novel/tell-all, I am using the real names of friends, enemies and lovers in the drafts. When I get the completed work ready for a publisher I am going to give everyone the opportunity to vote. You will get to say "me" or "not me" and then I will change the names of all the cowards. Until then, if I disappear, someone had better delete the manuscript. You can find it on this laptop in the "RtM" folder.
As for the blog, I will continue to tell my "friend" stories, but I think I will start numbering them. Something like: "My olde friend #32 was having a dustup with his 24 year old girlfriend when....." Those of you who are regular readers will get the inside joke. Once I am a ridiculously famous author, the late comers will have to read back all the way to March of '10 to get the insider insight.
Until then: "An olde friend (#16) walked into a bar. He spots my other olde friend (#23) slouched in a chair by the juke box. Friend #23 looks at friend #16 and says: 'Did you have to bring the gerbil?'"
