Welcome to "True Story: A Historical Account of My Dumb Life"
Aren't you excited?! Isn't this fun??
I HATE when memoirs start with being born, then slowly ramble through childhood. I don’t care what someone was like as a kid! Could they date? Rent their own penthouse apartment? Climb ruthlessly to the top of the most glamorous advertising agency in the city? Attend glittering balls with men who resembled Ken dolls? No?! Then I don’t wanna hear about it!! Just skip to the bits where they start having illicit affairs with bad boy celebrities and spare me the tedious details of the long, boring, powerless waiting period known as “childhood.”
This is also how I feel about my own childhood, tbh. I hated being a kid. Thus, it’s logical to assume that I also hated being a baby. Probably the only thing I even remotely liked about babyhood was getting lots of undeserved attention, and I can only surmise this because it’s something I still enjoy as an adult. But I can’t tell you that for sure, because babies don’t know anything! They also can’t do anything - definitely not anything exciting, like heroically saving someone from a burning building or beating the odds to win the Olympic gold - and they can’t be anything, either, except a mewling, helpless, boring old baby. They have no imagination, no skills, and no interesting hobbies.
In short, babies are losers.
So why would anyone wanna waste time on baby and kid stories when they could instead just jump ahead to hot hallway make-outs and sweet, cold revenge? Beats me! I have zero interest in hearing about what you or anyone else was like as a baby, and you probably aren’t gonna be all interested in learning about what I was like back then, either.
But this, my friends, is a historical account of my dumb life, and thus, a chronological journey by design. In order to fully understand what brought me to those real-life hot hallway make-outs and that sweet, cold revenge in the first place, we gotta begin at the start.
And not even just the born’ing part: We gotta go back to the people who existed before I was alive...the ones who had to exist in order for me to be alive.
Again, you might be thinking, “Snore”, which I wouldn’t blame you for! As a rule, unless you’re Jeremy Irons and have just discovered that the crumbling medieval Irish castle you were so inexplicably drawn to and now own is in fact the same castle your direct ancestors looked upon every day as they lived and died hundreds of years ago, go ahead and save those genealogy stories for Ancestry dot com 👍🏻😘
But if you’re one of God’s special soldiers like me and you do have stories like Jeremy Irons’ (but not a castle, unfortunately), then I’d tell you to add them to your own historical account of your dumb life, too!
Editor’s Note:
When I originally wrote this intro, I ended it with, “fear not, sports fans: We won’t spend a ton of time in thine ancestral lands” because I was like, “This is MY True Story, not theirs…if they wanted a book written about their life, then they should have stripped some tree bark, squeezed out some berry juice, and scrawled it out themselves!” That was back when I thought I had already uncovered the most interesting facts about my heritage…and while there was maybe one or two “hey did you know?” tales in there, it wasn’t exactly serial series material.
Now, though? HOO BOY…from Civil War heroes to Mayflower dum-dums to royal relations to possibly maybe being descended from a fairy-tale figure to tracking ancestors all the way back to BC, have I got some stories for you.
And also I did not spend an entire summer dissolving into 7th-grade-algebra era-like temper tantrums whilst trying to teach myself how to read raw DNA just to skim over this part!!!!
So anyway.
Want these posts straight to your inbox? While I’ll be posting the serial series of True Story: Pre-AC across the week on my website (how many times during the week? I have no idea! I just know that if I only do one post a week, I’ll be writing & publishing True Story until I’m 80), every Tuesday Substack subscribers will receive one featured post plus links to all the other posts that went up on the blog that week. Right now all Substack content is totally free!
You can also catch daily nostalgic content on Substack Notes and on my Instagram and TikTok.