So let me regale you with the unimportant minutiae that compromise my life, because nothing screams self-obsessed more than inane insignificant observations that make me feel like I am not really so insipid to think that my life rises above that of the tedious humdrum.
So lets play a game. Below are 26 factoids about my life, one for each letter of the alphabet. 25 of them are absolutely true. Only one of them is a lie. Tell me which one of the following statements you think is false.
A: I once lived in Guadalajara, Mexico for 4 years but I don’t remember much of it.
B: A marriage of mine lasted for only 52 days before separation.
C: David Gordon Green, the director of the film Pineapple Express, was also the cinematographer of my sophomore year student film.
D: My worst job ever: High school age linen sorter and washing machine operator at a hospital laundry facility during the AIDS crisis in the mid-80s.
E: I have a picture of Pat Lalama actually petting a llama.
F: The furthest north I have ever traveled is Carcross, Yukon Territory.
G: I just had to look up the word “furthest” on the internet to see if I used it correctly and I am still unsure so I left the abovementioned sentence alone.
H: My hands turned green briefly for a time from a job I had putting logo stickers on brand new straw brooms coming off the assembly line. What is even stranger is that I got the job by applying at the headquarters of the McKee Baking Company who makes Little Debbie snack cakes.
I: The first lottery ticket I bought in Los Angeles hit 4 out of 6 numbers, including the mega number, but I threw the ticket away because I was under the erroneous impression that you had to hit all 6 numbers to win anything.
J: I once enjoyed a “quicky” on the sky ride at Opryland.
K: I fell asleep one time while standing up holding a boom microphone over my head.
L: One New Year’s I took a picture of a drunk girl kneeling on a chair facing the wall and I put a caption on it that asked, “Blair Witch?” That same night another guy took a video of the same girl giving him a blowjob.
M: I had to sit in a police department waiting area in Texas while a family member was being questioned about bringing baby parrots across the Mexican border.
N: I was in a car wreck where my older sister got her long hair all tangled up on the rear view mirror and she had to get her hair cut short in order to extricate her from the car.
O: I directed the first ever English language play translated from Spanish that was written by the world famous Puerto Rican playwright Roberto Ramos Perea and he was present at the opening.
P: In an early poem of mine I compared Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to my ex-wife’s vagina.
Q: At one time I could run a mile in under 5 minutes. My best time that I remember was 4:47.45 my freshman year in high school.
R: I had to sit in a principal’s office all day because I was accused of taking off the lug nuts from expensive student vehicles in the parking lot and all I had to eat that day before I went home were Jelly Belly Beans.
S: Sharon Stone told Lisa Gregorich, my boss at Hard Copy, that I looked like a fat Robert Downey, Jr., after I greeted them at the premiere of Hollywood Animal Crusaders.
T: I got so mad that I got blocked in while parked at a strip mall that after 20 minutes of waiting for the owner to return I then physically pushed a Mazda Miata out of the way and into the street even though the rear wheels were locked because of the hand break.
U: I was involved in a ménage á trois situation that sometimes included threesomes with two lesbians. The situation with the lesbians lasted for more than a year for some strange reason. They were lesbians and hated when I suggested that maybe they were really bisexual. This question of mine is what made them stop having sex with me or so they claimed.
V: I saw a homeless person spitting and stomping and cursing Lorne Greene’s star on the Walk of Fame.
W: I got a “B” in an acting class my Senior year that knocked me out of the running for valedictorian and salutatorian at graduation. Turns out the person who got valedictorian was the daughter of the same acting teacher and one of the Deans of the University.
X: I refractured my arm in the same spot two days after I got the cast taken off.
Y: I carried around a replaced driveshaft in the bed of my truck for about a year because I was afraid to throw it in a dumpster because I knew the serial number on it could be traced back to my truck. Finally I stashed it in the front of my parking space of my apartment building. Then recently my landlord said I couldn’t leave it there anymore. So now it is in the bed of my truck again.
Z: I have an inversed body dysmorphic disorder image problem where I see myself in my mind’s eye as thinner or at least as thin as I was when I was younger in the past. So when I see current pictures of myself as grossly obese in actuality, I feel shock, intense shame, embarrassment, and guilt, and I try desperately to keep tags of those pictures away from my Facebook profile. This is the reason why I wear black clothing most of the time.
Rumrazor Press 
I’m going to hazard a guess and say J, the Sky-Ride quickie.
(If that one’s true, she was talented; that was a very short ride!)
The sky ride quicky is TRUE. After rubbing on each other for half the day, and holding hands, kissing, fondling, rubbing, grinding, heavy petting on the log ride, making out when they turned off the lights in the Little Deuce Coupe, on EACH other while waiting in lines, after ALL that, when it got dark and quiet, and we realized that we only had an hour left to be together, then hormones on the sky ride took over and we…. or rather I didn’t even last through the whole ride. By the time we got to the other side, we were perfectly composed.
That, sir, is IMPRESSIVE.
(cue applause)
I’m guessing ‘H’
My hands turning green is TRUE. Kim, this happened to me the one semester I attended Southern College, at the time called Southern Missionary College, in Collegedale, TN. The broom factory was one of the McKee businesses that employed Adventist students from the college for they were closed on Saturdays. The straw for the brooms is primed and coated with a green substance and we received the brooms hot off the assembly line so that we could stick on the logos before the brooms went to packaging to be wrapped in plastic and boxed. My hands turned green, the palms and my fingernails. I could actually tell who else worked in the broom factory from the school because of the green hands. After I quit working there because I did not like attending that school, my hands returned to their natural color gradually after a few weeks.
Oh….! I have to come back to this later tonight–in equal parts because I can’t stop laughing long enough to concentrate AND because there are certainly some strange parallels between our lives if certain of the above are true…and if they are not, it’s still freakishly parallel, lol xx
Here’s a suggestion: doing another vein of this game where you write two poems, one about actual and one totally fictitious, and each person that guesses has to do the same
Ok. Sounds good. I am currently working on another post of 25 true but 1 false factoids which I will call “animal encounters” but I like the poem idea as well.
I’m going for N: Seems for her hair to get tangled to the point of cutting it, the car would have had to roll a couple of times, no seat-belt. Unless of course the mirror broke free flying at your sister head and being caught in her hair which may or may not have been very curly or piled up on her head…… (I’m playing the accident over in head as you’ve probably figured)
The car was a Catalina station wagon and I was in the back seat. The teenage girl who hit us was on her driving license test. I got thrown on the floorboards and the way I fell I was kinda stuck there until the front seat was moved forward. My sister was not wearing her seatbelt in the front passenger seat and since the car hit us almost head on from the left hand side she lurched in that direction and her hair whipped forward and wrapped itself up around the rear view mirror. Before the accident, her hair naturally fell down to her knees. The rescue workers had to close crop the part of her hair that got entangled on the rear view mirror to get her out of the car. She also had cuts on her hands and face because the front window shattered. After she recuperated, she then had to clip the rest of her hair short to match. So the story is TRUE.
Ok, without looking at everyone’s response I’m going with Z,
Unfortunately, this factoid is TRUE. I first became aware of this problem while talking to a therapist at NCSA in the wake of my divorce. I thought I had it beat for a while but Facebook and the ease of getting your picture taken and tagged has rekindled and acerbated the problem. If you notice in my Facebook picture pages, I have very few pictures of me in the last 10 years and the ones that I do have posted are either professional promotional pictures or pictures taken at flattering angles or wearing black clothes.
Well I’m pissed you had to bring up the night about the chair and me being all Blair Witch n all and then you know…sucks being me.
Actually a friend of mine getting very upset about L is a real possibility. L is TRUE.
Dangit I wanted a poem!
Hey, wait. You didn’t limit our number of guesses.
Therefore…