Did you know that November is National Invent Your Personal History Month? No? That's because I invented it as part of my personal history last November. It's become one of the signature achievements in my fantastic fictional existence. That, and the fact that I beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter dash. Twice. In space.
I'm doing the full life story rewrite for one reason: retirement planning. Rather than save and invest, my adviser thinks I should write a best-selling personal memoir and live off the royalties. (She's a bit unorthodox, though she did graduate top of her class from the Lionel Richie School of Finance in Cleveland.) And, let's face it, a guy can sell a lot more memoirs when he's got a compelling personal story to tell – growing up poor, growing up in wartime, growing up as a Kardashian, and so on.
I grew up middle class in the suburbs of Chicago. My high water mark there was that I once got the stars of the TV show “Law and Order” to autograph a bag of Funyuns. Which I threw out by mistake a week later. The only way I'm gonna have any dignity as an old guy is to reinvent my life as a young guy.
And what an exciting life it has become (now)! My story gets really exciting in the late '90s, right after I graduate from Wossamotta U (where Bullwinkle the Moose once played football!). I head west to take a full-time job at Vegas Legends Coffee Roasters. As a junior taste tester, I'm assigned to help develop the company's signature blends, “Dean Martin's Celebrity Roasts.” The only thing worse than the coffee is the office politics; I leave in early 1999 when a backbiting line manager transfers me to a lesser product line, the “Don Rickles 'You Hockey Pucks Deserve Terrible Coffee' Coffee.”
I land next in New York, a staff writer for MTV's website. I'm on the tech beat, so I have to write about about just how bad the world will be after the millennium bug ruins all technology (My best piece was “Yes, We Will Still Air 'House of Style' After Y2K.”) Ironically, I lose all my articles to the Y2K bug; my desk computer is the only one in the world to be affected. And then MTV shuts down production of “House of Style.” I am broke. I am desperate. Cindy Crawford stops hanging out with me. It is the dark point of my imaginary life.
But I don't give in to despair; no, my memoir will need a triumphant comeback and/or a parallel to TV chef Julia Child if I am to turn it into a best seller! The comeback starts in an unexpected place: NASA. I get lost on a tour of Johnson Space Center in Houston and am mistaken for the head of a shadowy work group called G Section. I focus our efforts on bringing humpback whales through time, like in “Star Trek IV,” which we accomplish in record time. This saves Earth in the year 2286, and I retire with my three Nobel prizes to New Hampshire and begin writing my memoirs.
Powerful stuff, don't you think? Now I just need a title for the memoir – all I've come up with is “My Life on Planet Vulcan,” and that doesn't sound right. I wouldn't want my fake life story to sound made up or anything.
