Free Dating Your Mom by Ian Frazier Page B

mudslinging, backstabbing, self-centered, conceited people who ever lived? It is only within the last few months that I have come to an understanding of just how bad writers can be. The event that really opened my eyes was when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) selected me, out of a multitude of other writers, to participate in their five-year Community in Space program on an orbiting station twenty thousand miles above the earth. I won’t bother to review all the nasty, sniping attacks on me which many of the unsuccessful candidates for the position have given vent to in national publications. I only wonder if the space colonists (all of them leaders in their fields) who were chosen to represent the other professions had to endure such a torrent of abuse from their colleagues. My feeling is that they did not.
    It has been written that my selection was the result of backstairs political maneuvers on my part. When you see that written anywhere, you will know for sure that the author has never met me, and that, in fact, he knows less about me than he does about the President of Togo. As anyone with even a slight acquaintance with me will tell you, I am a man who was born, and has remained, a truthteller; that is the very core of my nature. To speak anything other than the truth is an act of which I am almost physically incapable. So, as it happens, the hypocrisy, flattery, and glad-handing that grease the social wheels for millions of my fellows are skills far beyond my ken. The unblinking light of my regard falls the same upon everyone (including myself) without fear or favor. This troublesome
honesty of mine has stood in the way of my advancement more times than I can count, but I accept its disadvantages without complaint; you see, it’s just the way I am.
    Now, to set the record straight, and to put a stop to the half-truths and rumors, I will tell how NASA came to choose me. I am afraid it is a simple story, entirely devoid of exciting secret schemes. One day, I picked up a newspaper and saw the announcement that NASA was looking for top members of some forty different professions to live for five years in a creative community housed in an orbiting space station. By chance, I was unemployed at the time, and eager for new challenges. I rushed down to the Pentagon, found the offices of the Air Force, and put my name on the sign-up sheet. My name was not at the top of the list; nor was it at the bottom. Then I was told that anyone who wished to apply had sixty days to submit the necessary recommendations, as well as a sample of his or her most recent work. I gave much thought to the sample I would submit. I wanted it to have a little something for everyone; I wanted it to be fresh; I wanted it to grapple with large themes. So, first of all, I went out and bought a middle-sized motor home with my own savings. I was convinced that I must leave behind the comfortable routines of my life up to that point. After much painful soul-searching, I decided to split once and for all from my estranged wife. I had lost her boyfriend’s phone number, so I left a note on her car informing her of my intention. Then, just to be on the safe side, I also broke up with the guy at the newsstand, the boy who serviced my vehicle, and a tolltaker on the New Jersey Turnpike. I set off down
the highway with her recriminations still ringing in my ears.
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    My first stop was New England. I picked a comfortable campsite and got right to work. Immediately I was pleased to notice that the stately, brooding shadows of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson fell across my typewriter as I chronicled life in the land of the three-martini lunch, where Ivy League-educated denizens of sprawling bedroom communities improvise unconventional marriages in the sexual confusion of the later twentieth century. That was fun; but I began to worry that I was speaking in a voice that could do with a bit more American authenticity. So I headed