Tell the truth but tell it slant

Which is a line from Emily Dickenson. Tell the truth/But tell it slant.

 

Here are a few small truths I am going to tell after being tagged several times for Honest Scrap.

 

1 I have to pluck hard black hairs out of my chin at least once a day. My testosterone levels have gone crazy since I had the hysterectomy and any day now I shall start crushing beer cans in my unmanly fist. As opposed to drinking from them.

 

2 My favourite cure for anything from gastric flu to hangovers to maleriabirds-eye chillies with garlic and spaghetti. It has to blast the psyche, make your eys water and induce choking anguish and blister your palate. Medicine that tastes scary is good for you.

 

3 I dream about being raped as a child every single night of my life. Horrible but true.

 

4 I have a fixation on the dead writer Roberto Bolano and this is why:

“He didn’t set out to do this just to prove something, to experiment, or to make some nihilistic statement. As he said many times, writing was for him a radical way of living, and thus he had to find a vital and arresting and, in some ways, anti-literary approach to fiction.”
That is the writer Francisco Goldmann commenting on Bolano.

5 I am one of the loneliest people I know.

 

6 Only Roberto Bolno has ever illuminated for me the way I feel about the past. The past pursues me, I have no way of not being haunted by it. This is from the passage in his novel 2006 describing Ingeborg’s death:

‘We’re in a place surrounded by the past. All these stars,’ and she draws his attention to the stars: All this light is dead,’ said Ingeborg. ‘All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.’

7 I have never heard a story told in a meeting with which I did not identify.

8 I believe most people are doing the very best they can to make sense of their lives.

9 I did not formally go to school until I was 12 and I have never learned how to do mental arithmetic. I can add and subtract but not multiply or divide.

 

10 I can speak Xhosa, Sotho, RuwaShona and Swahili, but not well. I speak French well-enough and write it fluently.