Wishful Drinking

11 A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF ME

Before I wrap up, I’d like to share some of the things with you that I’ve learned from going through all this nonsense.

• “Resentment is like drinking a poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

• Saying you’re an alcoholic and an addict is like saying you’re from Los Angeles and from California.

• Some of the wisdom I have gotten from my grandmother—my mother’s mother—the closet locker, who taught me, “A fly is as likely to land on shit as it is on pie” (which is true, if you think about it). She also said, “Cry all you want, you’ll pee less!” (I don’t know if that is true though.)

• But the main thing I’ve learned, I learned all by myself, no help needed. I learned not to get my tongue pierced. Because if you’re getting it pierced for the reason why I think you’re getting it pierced and you’re not good at that thing to begin with, no little piece of jewelry is going to save the day.

I was talking to a priest friend of mine recently (as one does) and I was telling him about how I was scheduled to meet with my daughter and her shrink the following week.

“It’s going to be so difficult,” I moaned.

He shrugged. “You’ve done difficult before.”

Well, who hasn’t done difficult before?

As I mentioned earlier, I turned fifty-two this year. (Did you hear, they made an announcement that fifty-two is the new thirty-one—or the new black.)

And I like to think of myself as a threshold guardian. “There but for the sake of me, go you!”

If I’ve forgotten to tell you anything in these pages, it could be the ECT, it could be bad memory from getting old, or it could be because there’s just too much stuff stuck in my head.

Sherlock Holmes believed the brain could only hold just so much information, so if he ever learned anything that was useless to his profession, he set about systematically to try to forget it.

I like to quote fictional characters, because I’m something of a fictional character myself! But my point is that I have something stuck in my brain. And because it’s in there I frequently get lost on my way to people’s houses, I always forget people’s names, and I leave stuff everywhere so that my husband, Dick Tater, has to pick up after me. And at times I forget parts of my show, which is how this whole thing got started. So now I’ve written it down at least.

Anyway, the following is the “something” that I have stuck in my brain which I go about trying to systematically forget publicly here in these pages! (And if you understood that, you’re in desperate need of medication.)

It’s a poem. Yes, as you probably guessed, a poem, by George Lucas:

I can’t forget that stupid, fucking hologram speech! That’s why I did dope!