From the intro to Love: Coming Soon…

Never say never. It’s true. The world and I thank Sarah Palin as the primary inspiration behind his memoir.

When he heard that the former vice presidential candidate and former Governor of Alaska had produced a 400-page memoir in just four months, Time magazine reporter Joel Stein wondered, “What took her so long?”

Since time is a precious commodity, his response was to write his own memoir in a day. It was a challenge and exercise I thought worthy enough to devote an entire day to, so I decided to produce one as well. The only difference is that unlike Palin and Stein, I didn’t employ a ghost writer or editor. As you’ll soon see, that was a major hole that should have been filled.

This was written in just under eighteen hours, five less than it took Band-Aid to record Feed the World back on November 25, 1984, a holiday season in which I witnessed first hand the outrageous lengths to which intelligent, mature adults would go just to score a grotesquely ugly Cabbage Patch doll for their spoiled children. They could have just bought them a copy of Feed the World.

The only advance work involved was a very rough outline sketched out a few days ago which sat on my cluttered desk largely ignored, and a long walk through Ljubljana’s pleasant early fall chill on Tuesday night when I muttered an occasional thought into my tape recorder. Those digital notes haven’t been transcribed yet, and it’s too late. I’m sleepy and time’s up.

The title?

It’s from some graffiti I stumbled across a few weeks ago. I’m an optimistic pessimist. I like to think that in spite of it all, something nicer could be lying in wait just around the corner.

You can download it here (PDF, 173k).

Leaving Drama behind, originally uploaded by pirano.