I, Meldon J. Sandrow, hereby reclaim my narrative, the same way Beyoncé J. Beyoncé is reclaiming hers.
For why should only the famous with swivelly hips be allowed to “reclaim” or “take charge of” their narrative? Should I be denied this right just because I don’t have a private hair stylist or a Things To Not Eat Any More Advisor?
For too long my narrative has been in the hands of those who only know me from seeing me every day and talking to me. No more. My narrative, like my distinctive body odor after a shift at Shawarma, Etc, is my own.
I will no longer be defined by people like the kids who stood beside me in the pool to see how long it took me to notice my leg getting warmer.
In the narrative that I reclaim, I can sing like a nightingale and catch fish like an osprey. I can also fly like a majestic swan.
What? So, how do they get to those ponds everywhere?
Okay, then, like a majestic duck.
I accept the fact that reclaiming my narrative will involve the hard work of doing away with or anonymously flaming some of the other narratives about me. Like the one about me grinding off a testicle in a high school wood shop accident. It was a fingernail, I just screamed like it was a testicle.
I still have it in a baggie here someplace.
For a wiser man then me once said, Know Thyself. If thou knowest someone else and he knowest you, get together somewhere like a coffee shop and swap the stuff thou knoweststh with him.
I assure you, I do know myself. I have known myself most of my life.
In my narrative I am confident and decisive. I will never again get in an elevator and tell the person next to the buttons, “Oh… wherever you’re going.”
Nothing can stop me from now on except that thing they clamp on my tire. I happen to be of the opinion that people are pretty lucky they don’t have those for shoes. Unless you count jail.
I won’t let someone behind a desk at the recruiting office define my intelligence with a “number.” You can’t measure the totality of a complex human being with a single number. Especially the number 84.
One might ask, what was society doing with my narrative all this time anyway? Because they sure have screwed it up. There are places I can’t go any more without a Big Gulp cup and a droopy hat because of what society’s done to my narrative. “Oh, great, here he comes,” people say. Then other people say, “No, I don’t think that’s him.”
It’s high time the Meldon Sandrow that people hear about is the real Meldon Sandrow: fairly attractive, kind to animals, of average weight, not really needing glasses, with a high school diploma, a year of college and knowing three yo-yo tricks. But not just Walk the Dog. Good ones.
That’s why I’m ready to announce to the world that, from now on, whatever I want, I will just jump up and take. Unless there’s someone taller who can reach it for me. Or if I check on my phone and it’s on sale somewhere else. In which case I’ll ask the tall guy to put it back. And if, perchance, he gets miffed? What care I for his miffedness? I’ll just say something escape-y, like “Wow, is that the time?”
For too long I’ve been defined, in the small minds of the small-minded, by things I did as a child. Like the time my family still laughs about, when I shoplifted an inflatable woman because I thought it was a pool toy. And it could have been, too. But, to my credit, I confessed, and my mother cried, and my dad said he was proud of me, and then we couldn’t return it right away because my uncle Stu said he wanted six more hours with it in the gazebo.
From now on at work I will not allow myself to be snarkily called “Mr. Efficient.”
And when camping I won’t allow myself to be unanimously voted Mr. Stinky Tent.
Meldon Sandrow doesn’t wait for things to happen anymore. He makes them happen. And if they’ve been happening without him, he makes them stop happening until it’s convenient for him to start happening again. For example, if he’s been waiting at an intersection and the light doesn’t change, he will drive through anyway, ignoring the lesser mortals driving cars they actually care about.
People who think of me as uncreative will soon be taken aback. It wasn’t them who invented a new sexual position, the “37.” This is like a 69, but you do it by yourself with a hockey stick.
For what is a man? That’s what I thought.
What gives others the right to narrate me? I’m not a pretend character in a film. Except in college when I accidentally huffed Small Bug Killer for three weeks because the spritzer was the same color as my one-hitter.
I have so many dreams. Like being a mystical warlock named Saurak. Who is to tell me I can’t? There’s nothing in my lease about it.
Also, we were supposed to get two parking spaces but the dumpster’s always there and my roommate has to get up early so I’m left in the bowling alley parking lot, where many a heavy sphere has graced my hood. Does anyone know a lawyer?
I am kidding, of course. No one really knows a lawyer.
This is my Manifesto, which revokes all previous Manifestos proclaimed by me. Except the one about never again participating in something called an “Encino Blindfold,” which is still in effect. I will never get back those six hours spent in the dark behind a dry cleaner’s, or my eight dollars.”
Meldon J. Sandrow
