i'd like to tell stories, but i'm not a story maker. sometimes i make the past into a story. but not the kind i read. i'd like to just tell a story about what happened, but what if it only happened to me? that's all i got.

i think denis johnson said he wrote autobiographical fiction. you can't tell anything without exaggerating, without a lesson in there somewhere, without exaggeration, lessening. you move on to something more. something else is happening. 

as an aside, since it was at the beginning of the walk, after the sidewalk memorial, a woman, the kind i my head always separates, says, woe, man, walks up with her prim partner and their clothed and tethered little lap dogs smiles unseeing saying as though to her partner glancing withering at mister standing hopefully by the drinking fountain, i thought there was an ordinance that all dogs should be on leash, so i turn and say, as though she were talking to me, hmm, i must be really, really stupid, i've been walking him without a leash for years. you've been lucky. (ah, now she's talking to me). lucky me, years and years of good luck. but! i say not lucky, i'm a responsible citizen, and my dog is trained. i'm not talking to you she says. think about it! think about it! i yell to the back of her, to the back of her mind, and i sigh and curb my wild mind, and walk on in the most heartrending freedom a dog can have and enjoy.