Skin a Cat

Food is not the answer. Pharmaceutical products do not provide the answer. Exercise offers answers, but not to the questions posed. Meditation offers advice, but in a language only ascetics can understand. There is danger in asking the wrong questions; especially when all the answers come in packages suitable only for perfume and falsehoods. You are not the right person to listen for an answer and now is not the right time to hear it. No one wants to rely on the wrong advice given one hundred years too early or one second too late. Timing is a pointless exercise when the faceless watch has no hands.

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I plan to write the unauthorized autobiography of a political assassin. The book will begin to take shape ten years after death, thereby giving me a more accurate perspective on what my life and death were like. Autobiographies are written far too early and they are penned by the wrong people. Only after the commotion surrounding a person’s death is a measured perspective of the deceased person’s life possible. And the author of an autobiography often is too close to the subject. Distance, both with respect to both time and the relationship with the writer, is necessary if the published product is to be as open and  honest as one would hope. Autobiographies drafted by the author often omit unflattering portrayals of the writer. Conversely, those same books frequently contain bald-faced lies, stories manufactured to make the author seem more intelligent, better looking, taller, and more stable financially. In many cases, the autobiographer describes an entirely different person than the one he/she ostensibly is writing about. For example, a baker who has worked as an icing-maker for his father’s cake-decorating shop may present himself (in his autobiographical work) as an accomplished big game hunter and president of several small European countries. He may augment that artificial experience by telling lies about his time in the Kansas State Navy, when he was awarded the Multi-Dimensional Heroism Trophy for saving the lives of several hundred Kansan sailors whose submarines were under attack by flocks of rabid piranhas. In fact he never served in the Kansas Navy; during the time he says he served, he actually was in prison for running a fentanyl smuggling ring between the Vatican and the Confederate States of America. The lesson? Fact check before you find yourself awaiting execution by guillotine for a crime you may not have committed.

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Why write this absurd drivel? Why not? I base these stories on the time I spent in Federal prison in the Achilles. I had been convicted of money laundering, sex trafficking, and counterfeit stamp collecting for a Pachedermalian gun runner named Lucinda Popcorn. The money was good, but the jobs were few and far between, so I took on some side gigs for a banjo counterfeiter, Bubba Stradivarius. Bubba was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

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There’s more than one way to skin a cat.