All right.
Happiness first, right?
[LAUGH]
Yeah.
You want to stop there?
That's fine.
And that's one of those--
writing a memoir is one of those activities where
you're testing your own memory.
I guess I think that's partly the whole--
not the whole purpose of it but you
are seeing how much you remember or how much you
remember correctly, and what you don't remember at all.
And the detail about the clothes and the shredded-- the
shredded up clothes in the plastic bag,
I didn't for years and years and years.
Until one time, for whatever reason,
we were sitting around talking and it came up.
And my mom said that and I had no idea,
and it was just-- it seemed the most horrible thing I
could imagine.
And she said, I still have those clothes somewhere.
It's probably in your closet.
Do you want them?
And I was like, no.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I don't.
But they're somewhere in my closet
somewhere right now, sort of spookily sealed and timeless,
their own kind of memoir, I guess.
So if we're still doing OK on time, I'll read some poems.
Let's see.
Let me see that one, the book with Godzilla.
My second book has a--
I never knew-- the press was running behind
on their publication schedule, and I never
knew what the cover was going to look like until I got the book.
And when they showed it to me, it
had a picture of a toy Godzilla.
And I sort of-- what's the word?
Squee?
I sort of squee to myself.
I was like, that is awesome.
I loved it.
And so I knew right there and then
like all of my future publishers would
be hard pressed to ever make a cover that I like as much.
And so far, I've had nice covers but they've never
been Godzilla.
So I was extremely happy about that.
Let me find a poem here to read.
Page one, please.
That's easy.
And this is called, "Nothing."
"Between Buck Owens and Vivaldi, what's
left to listen to but the stars?
So I do, dialing the radio down to indeterminate static.
What I always thought was absence, an aria
of sizzling nothingness.
Instead it's the Milky Way irradiating arrhythmia
all the way back.
"It's gossip of the vacuum, that nothing
has never been truly nothing is why I believe even still
in love.
Beside two rivers, I have lived nearly all my life, and these
beneath one sky muttering its endless alphabet of sine waves.
"Jupiter with its flock of moons and the stone
from which we hope to squeeze one drop of water,
red Mars pulsing in the blank field of night.
I've wanted to leave Earth behind,
gravity's orphan at last, but not Earth with its two
good seasons and two bad, and not
its angel-winged clams luminous in the mud bed of a river.
so different-- so distant from me.
"I can't remember where that water
is except that I've dreamed it, except that
in it I sank all the way down."
I'm not too proud to mention that the bit
about the angel-winged clams comes from a Matthew
McConaughey movie.
[LAUGHTER]
Seriously.
He was talking about--
I don't even remember what the movie was,
but he was trying to pick up this girl in a market.
And he picks up this clamshell, and he's
sort of like-- he is sort of giving a dissertation
about the history of the shell.
And he's talking about how it was like these clams glowed
in the water.
And so you could swim down to the bottom of the river
and these clamshells would be glowing,
and that's how divers found them.
And I was like, even though this is a Matthew McConaughey movie,
that's the stuff of poetry.
And so I walked around with it for a year or two
before I used it.