The 505 Doubling

ENL 505 - Stylistics
Doubling Life Story Assignment

I

I was born then died, thinking.

My life story is relationships. You should see the other people. Ooof.

“He was unique. Like everyone else. Rust belt kid, rust belt sensibilities, and iron oxide emotions. He tried really hard though.”
-Todd Snyder, Ohioan

My mom said I scaled a fence just after learning to walk. I loved hearing her tell that story; she seemed to intimate I could do anything to which I put my mind.
And I have.
But I put my mind to a lot of the wrong things.

Jimmy Fallon: Tell us your life story.

Me: There isn’t much to tell. It’s a miracle I earned a college degree and it’s an even bigger miracle I earned a master’s degree. Can there be degrees of miracles?

Jimmy Fallon:

Me: So to make a long story short I work, parent, husband, and think about ranking miracles. I can’t believe, practically incredulous, I’m not back in Barberton, Ohio, drunk, working some soul-killing manufacturing gig, living in a double wide trailer, awaiting a triple bypass, after a fourth divorce. But enough about me, tell me your miracle.

Life story = biography = picture of life. My life. Is my life worthy of a picture? Worthy of a picture, others might care about? What have I done to warrant attention? To warrant interest in my life from dirt-poor Ohio kid with alcoholism in his genes, to married to an Ivy Leaguer, master’s degree educated, upper middle class, Rhode Island parent of three, still with alcoholism in his genes? You see any picture of life requires the past...the past that weighs like an anvil on your chest...All. Life. Long. No one escapes their past. Logicians, of which I count myself, don’t like to use “none” or “all” because “one” collapses the argument. But everyone has a past because they have a present. If you don’t believe me, and I don’t blame you for not, consider this line from Being There: “A man’s past cripples him. His background turns into a swamp and invites criticism.” So it seems I’m crippled. And in a swamp. Not a great combo. And for the trifecta I have you there, reading this, criticizing. Probably murmuring something about metafiction and how cheap and lazy it is. Great.

II

Think of the way it feels when you hear your voice on a recording. Most of us bristle, even if a little. “Is that what I sound like?” Autobiography asks a similar question: Is that what I’ve lived like?” Autobiography tosses your lump of a life onto a steel-cold table in the gross lab, where with razor sharp scalpels and muscular forceps and probes, tears apart your judgement and character and personality with unceasing fire-breathing criticism of your horrible decisions and gnashes teeth at your incessant laziness and wrings hands raw due to your pathological sensitivity and erodes all possibility of contentedness or serenity or self-actualization at best and at worst births institutionalization, to produce the same face piercing cringe when you hear your voice through your ears and not through your head. Autobiography is not some mild, innocuous self-sadism akin to a sauna what with its relaxed-muscles finale. Nor is it torturous introspection to reveal the glass is half-full and “just look at all you’ve accomplished from such modest beginnings!” Honestly and authentically, factually, it exposes existential pain reaped from a life lived not through the ears, but through the head.

When you hear what you hear, matters. I heard I am a being-unto-death in an Existentialism class in 1992. Death - the possibility of me that prohibits all other possibilities. In my early twenties I was open to information, a sponge soaking up the world and Heidegger. Saturated I became. I have lived, knowing there is an end. An end that cannot be outstripped: by women, booze, weed, tv, NOTHING...looms on the horizon quite like it. I proceeded accordingly, but took chances, put myself on the line, THE line! for us both. For all of us.

Hear me: My life is counter to Pascal’s wager. Infinite gains necessitate infinite beings; I am finite. What I believe matters. Beliefs bloom behaviors.

The real eternity is before birth, in silence. I hear. I live.

A cacophonous, volume-sickening, ear-splitting, authentic, life.

***

Write your life story in 6 words. Then, write your life story in 12 words. Then 24, 48, 96, 192. Or, if you want to begin with 192 and work your way down to 6, you can do that, too.

Caveat: once used, you cannot repeat any phrase. That is, you are not simply revising, adding, filling. Each piece should be unique. And try not to repeat your “style” or “voice” from one to the next. Mix them up. Take chances. But meet the word count. Focus on making each word a vibrant contributor.