Swimming Naked with Jellyfish

CHAPTER 1

Iris. That's me. Iris Andrea. I'm sitting here waiting for my next tragedy but who knows when it'll come, so in the meantime I'll write a book. Yeah, a book. I have so much to say, really I do. I can't wait. But I have to warn you first that I'm a very intimate woman...physically and emotionally and in every single way. I'm going to tell you stuff you're going to love and hate and be so embarrassed about. For one thing, I love sex. Love to do it, think about it, talk about it. Can't get enough of it. It's always on my mind. Thank God I have my father's sexual appetite and not my mother's, because if I had my mother's, I'd be laid out dead like a prehistoric insect frozen in the middle of a block of ice. No shit.

I'm so excited trying to decide where to begin that I just lost control and bit off a nail to the raw red part and now it hurts and it's bleeding and I won't be able to take a shower for two days, all because my manic side is in control. Okay, I know how to settle down. I'll light my cream-colored candle, slap my wind chimes a couple of times, hold in my lap my father's glass paperweight with a rabbit etched in it, put on the Out of Africa CD because it makes me cry, and the last thing I always do just before I start to write is look at a picture of my father sitting right in front of me next to my computer monitor. I look at his face...God, the power that his face has for me. Okay, I'm ready to write my book.

I've got to explain, first, why I'm writing this book. My father just died and my mother died a year before him, and my sister just stopped talking to me because my father left me his money, which is really okay because she and I never got along anyway. I feel so alone that I have to write a book. I've never written a book before but I've got to do a big thing or I'll die.

Let's just get a few things straight. I hate phony things and phony people, so I'm not going to try to impress you by using big words that I don't even know and that you may not know and get annoyed at me about. I also hate the phony scheme of deceiving you to get you interested enough to want to read my book by finding a hook that will make you turn the page.

Well, I don't know about you, but I can't stand the idea of playing a game according to someone else's rules, because I'm such a rebel. I find all these rules absolutely fucking boring as hell, and when I find something absolutely fucking boring as hell, I break out of it and find my own goddamn way of doing it. A way that pleases me and me alone.

I want to write a book that you'll know is from me. Oh, by the way, you won't find any semicolons here. They irritate me. Half of this, half of that, the semicolon can't make up its mind who it wants to be.

So I want to tell you all about my life, which I think is plenty interesting just the way it is and doesn't need anything phony or deceiving or any hooks to make you turn the page.

You see, I have to write this book and tell you my story because I can't write my long letters to my daddy anymore. I feel so lonely without my daddy and I need someone else to open my heart to. Can I trust you with my heart? Will you touch it with kindness or will you squoosh it into the ground with the dirty sole of your shoe? Or are you going to dismiss me, as if I weren't important in this world, like my sister always did? Oooh, I'm going to enjoy telling you all about her. All the stuff she wouldn't let me say to her face. She's a phony and you know how I feel about phonies. Can you imagine the fun I'm going to have telling you all about her phony face? Well, enough about her for now.

In a way, though, I'll have more fun writing to you than when I wrote to my daddy because I can tell you stuff that I would be too embarrassed or too protective of his feelings to tell him.

So get comfortable. Get a cup of tea or coffee or a hot chocolate or a beer, whatever. I'll wait...

Okay, here we go.