I’m a crappy storyteller

I don’t have many stories about myself.  The stories I do have about myself largely ramble, lacking climax, trickling off eventually into mumbled endings.  They are less than impressions of me, they are some sort of odd string that you pull, hanging off an old sweater.  Somehow attached, not really anymore, that piece is an annoying harbinger of vague unraveling.

At any rate, I’m not much good at stories.  Not the cocktail hour kind, anyway.  It’s hard for me to hone it all into one sort of palatable two dimensional less than five minutes and you’ve digested the gist of the bit thing.  I tend to tell people about other people.

Cocktail character sketches, I guess.  I give their outlines, then if they’re still listening, I give their shading, I give their color. At this point I’m ready to give them movement, their sway, rhythm.  Of course I’ve lost you at this point, for another drink, for another partner in discourse.  I’m not so good at stories.

I collect people, always have.  I don’t know when it started.  I remember middle school.  Rough boys, the girls who got boobs early, I’d sit near them, head turned, asking strings of questions.  Sometimes I’d just be quiet and they’d just start talking.  This isn’t to say I was a good friend.  I never knew quite how to move beyond being their odd little witness, conduit, whatever.

So I’d collect them.  Not really their stories. Them.  Like some Pokemon of different bits of humanity.  Gotta catch em all, I guess.  So sometimes I bring them out at cocktail hour when everyone’s tongues and ears are just a bit more loose, hoping someday I can do something about it.  Like showing them to people will somehow make their lives suck less. Like lots of little characters frozen in time will do something more than provide a personal curio, a way to show these odd little creatures I’ve collected over the years, more museum curator than advocate.

See, I’m no good at stories.

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