Sunburn is becoming kinda gruesome over on the right side of things, holy crap. Also, there's a chill in the air, or the hint of one, I dare say. Hard to get re-used to the mugginess after being on the West Coast, even when it's not hot it's sticky. I had a falling out with my gym today after swimming some laps - apparently the terms of my deal were totally unverifiable and the guy that signed me out was gone - gyms are a bit of a goon industry - d'uh! - anyway, and joined the YMCA in Long Island City. Huge pool, looking forward to it. Tomorrow night is the bachelor party for Clay, really looking forward to that. We're eating at Old Homestead which is legendary and I've always been curious about, and then going to Privelage in Chelsea or some strip joint downtown where bands play, I can't remember the name - you know, bachelor party stuff. This weekend I'm painting my place - I forget the name of the type of yellow, but I like it again.

Anyway, yesterday I wrote answers to one of those surveys that they have on myspace? You know, the ones that ask a million detailed questions and most of them naughty, that teenagers all over the world fill out and post, becoming interviewed and celebritous for the next half hour or so - and my randy ruminations got some kudos from people I consider to be interesting writers myself. But then today, on my way home from work, in the Wendy's on Queens Blvd., over a spicy chicken sandwich, I read the following about Jonathan Franzen's new autobiography, and it was an exact description of why my "survey" responses works as a little read, sentimental as it may be:

Franzen grew up nerdy and nervous in a small, comfortable town in Missouri called Webster Groves. Here are a few things that younger Jonathan was afraid of, accoding to the autobiography The Discomfort Zone: "spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls", and most of all, "my parents." When he wasn't afraid, Franzen was embarrassed.In places The Discomfort Zone reads like outtakes from a Judy Blume young-adult novel. On a church retreat, a girl caught Franzen cheating at cards and thereafter addressed him as "Cheater". He once publicly confused the words masturbation and menstruation. For a high school speech class, he brought in his stuffed Kanga and Roo toys to illustrate his talk about Australian wildlife.

"It's like, if I was making a list of things that I don't want to talk about and don't want to write about publicly, these would be at the top of it," Franzen says, "That's the organizing principle: precisely the things that I think are least suitable for public consumption are the ones that I wanted to find a way to write about publicly, and to try to forgive myself for, by making myself a laughable figure."

So in the spirit of that, I'm pasting the "survey" - what seems to be the pickle now is how to write, and purely fictionalize the writing so that I am making up and telling a story, not just retelling memories that are real. The unchanged names are even a part of the guilty pleasure of these memoryettes - but to truly make stuff up seems so hard. I might end up being an anonymous blogger in order to really let myself go and get really into the writing. Change the names and don't site myself, and then just really write [and that's what is happening right here right now, I'm reposting this into my anonymous blog and changing round all the names. -ed].

Because this is too confessional to keep up unless a conscious effort is made to fictionalize the writing. Anyway, here it is with the obvious embellishments etc.....

1. Who was your first dance date?

This tall dark haired girl with thin limbs and big teeth - I was infatuated with her. She was about a foot taller than me about maybe about 15, I was 10 or so. It was summer camp and by the time we had our dance, I was a blabbering wreck who held her fingers in mine all wrong (two fingers per gap instead of one) but I thought she'd vanish if I let go. I was nervously blathering to her about some cabin mate of mine that apparently moaned all night like he was having an orgasm. I did'nt know what an orgasm was yet, but it was a story I'd heard earlier in the day. She expressed mock something - surprise, being impressed, tolerance.

2. Who was your first roommate?

This black dude Terence Black from Roxbury in Boston. This was my first semester at UMass Amherst. He'd been shot and was one of those angry political guys. Unfortunately his frat-where-you-get-branded and nation of Islam-like focus and self discipline slipped (via me?) as he started to smoke doob and drink, and would come back wrecked and belligerent, ranting until I got out of my top bunk with my pillow and went to crash with friends. Some nights were better than others. He did talk at the TV while we watched Letterman together about all the racist crackers, and defended me when my best friend at the time slept with the girl I loved. But mostly he batted me around gently (but still horribly) and pretty much told me how things would be. I moved out the very next semester. Thanks, Dennis, for teaching me the skillz of getting a large burocratic organization to do exactly what it is I need, and fast.

3. What alcoholic beverage did you first drink? Creme de Menthe, in high school, in Quebec City, with a school trip. I got drunk fast, of course, and proceeded to try and prove to myself and everybody how not-drunk I was, by talking to them about a load of nonsense and making it obvious how drunk I was. Back at the hotel the German teacher Wally Heimlich and this girl I was infatuated with did a bit of an intervention "I know you like me, but I am seeing someone" (she was in fact with this Risky Business Tom Cruise looking cat, and they were both equally good looking, but I still loved her) and the night ended with me weeping in the arms of Mr Heimlich while he comforted me. It could have been a weird Mr Antolini from Catcher in the Rye moment, a bit flitty - but really it was just a nerd who had got drunk for the first time and still felt hopelessly nerdy - more so in fact. Anyway, it was a pretty freakin surreal thing to have happened, in hindsight.

4. What was your first job?Delivering the daily paper, 79/80, I was 10/11 years old. The scene? Pre-dawn Cambridge Mass. Thanks mom and dad for driving me around. I found memories in the long darkened corridors of those Cambridge apartment buildings, thinking how this or that particular smell, of whatever specific cookery, defined that floor of that building and will always remind the people that live there of that time in their lives. Usually their entire lives, which was what sort of made it terrifying, the smells of other people's lives. It made me used to want to drop the newspapers and run screaming outta there.

5. What was your first car?

first one I drove was my parents first car in the States, a 78 Chevy Nova. Brown. I totalled it in the rain going too fast down Harvard Street towards Beacon Street in Coolidge Corner Brookline. I wailed into the car infront of me - it was fine, their spare tire suspended on the rear of their jeep like car - but the Chevy front was accordioned. They were plenty nice, the cops were gruff but nice, and my parents resigned that this car now needs to be cleaned and gotten rid of, and a new one would need to be obtained. There are family photos of my dad removing things from the so familiar brown wreck, wearing a look of resignation and weariness. This is the stuff you hear about living with teenagers, and good thing the boy didn't die - is what he may have been thinking when those pictures were being taken.

6. When did you go to your first funeral?

Still never. My grandparents died one by one in Moscow, but I was already in the States by then, and there's no way you can get a visa to travel to Russia as quickly as people get buried. So I missed both their funerals. Ive been to both their cemetary plots though. Everyone else keeps not dying.

7. What was your first broken bone?

I fractured my frist playing kick ball in grade school - that was a pretty goofy reason to wear a brace - oh and I also broke my right hand punching a wall in a hotel in Paris. the good news is that large, fist-shaped dent in the wall of that economy hotel is surely still there.

8. Who was your first grade teacher?

Some young, severe, attractive girl and this was in Moscow. Everyone wore uniforms, had specific ways to raise your hand, and generally behave impecabbly. There's no fucking about in a Russian school, especially when you are that little. I was restless and playing around, tossing the chalk rag up and down until the teacher came in and the chalk rag landed right on her head. I was mortified, but she was beside herself - as though it was a jar of maggots that suddenlywas upturned onto her pate. Her reaction threw me into a fit of dread - but then she removed the offending cloth and collected herself, and class began.

9. Where did you go on your first ride on an airplane?Hard to remember, but almost definitely from Moscow to Uzhgorod, which is in the Carpathian mountains in the region between Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia and Poland. It's where by grandparents lived. My grandfather was the town butcher. He gladly used to let me help him wash his fancy car. He kept chickens in the bathtub, so a little boy goes into the bathroom to pee, sees this live chicken in the tub, tried to play and prod at the bird who makes some perterbed sounds. A few hours later, it is now our dinner.

10. When did you sneak out of your house for the first time, who was it with?

I was raised in such a way where sneaking out was not necessary. I didn't have the right to stay out all night as a kid, but if I was going to go see a friend, no one ever objected.

11. Who was your first best friend and are you still friends with them?

No, God I've gone through many many many best friends in my life, probably more than I can count. There were best friends in Russia though I dont remember them, best friends the year I lived in LA as a recent immigrant (hello Misha and Genya), in grade school, once I learned enough English to hang with the cool kids, I had two new best friends losing along the way the two less cool best friends I had had prior. In high school it was more social climbing, until the last year I was well entrenched with the all mighty click of the coolest kids. But it didn't last long. Then there were a couple of serious relationships and those girls were my best friends, but not after it was over. I guess Debby, who was a grad student who spoke russian and looked after us, the overwhelming mass of Soviet emigrees flooding the Los Angeles school system, became my friend back then (we made each other laugh) and is still - best friend? One of them for sure - but definitely the person I've been friends with the longest. She's a little over 50 and I'm 37. But at the time I was 8 and she was 21 - she was a wild one and treated me like her wild son. Together we would drive down Hollywood Blvd. cranking the dance music out her car radio so loud that it was all for adrenoline, and making each other crack up at the inappropriateness of it all.

12. Where was your first sleepover?

Sleepovers go back further than a child remembers things, surely. There were many when I was really little, one with us junior high guys reminds me of waking up and Dave waking up, and Andrew Maddon coming over, and us talking dreamily about girls, and all their illicit bits, the things that suddenly mattered in the world more than anything else.

13. Who is the first person you call when you have a bad day?

If I have a real bad day, I'll absolutely spare anyone else the gory details. In fact, I seldom phone anyone for any reason - hate the phone. Text baby text! And email is still good

14. Whose wedding were you in the first time?

Nelson Enteleira and Lisa Obral, my Azorian friends in SE Mass, or, "Little Portugal" I performed some live rock with my old band Humbert, to which Nelson and Lisa danced joyously. During the wedding itself, I walked extremely stiffly with the procession to accept the cracker in the mouth by the priest at the end of the cueue. I think someone told me recently that I did'nt need to accept the offering of this thin, small, flat and round bread, but I didn't want to be rude.

15. What is the first thing you do in the morning?

Get the coffee on and check internet - then pray and do a huge bong hit.

16. What was the first concert you ever went to?

Little River Band at some outdoor tent thing - it was pretty cool. Then shortly after I saw Aerosmith with my mom at the Orpheum Theater in Boston. I'd won them on a radio station, as I won so many things by being the right number caller on station give aways. Not so much a fan and didn't know what we were instore for. People tried to give us ear plugs while they laughed at us openly, as we grimly made our ways down to our incredible seats. Lights go down. Band starts playing. Total pandemoneum (and this isn't Aerosmith yet, just the opener, but no one cares) when suddenly, as is customary, the drummer threw a stick into the crowd and it got caught firmly in my mom's hair. I stood back doing nothing, as was my wont, but delirious metal fans swarmed my mother's head fighting for the precious souveneer. My mother, thinking it was a bomb, thanked her rescuers from underneath their flapping, pulling and seeking hands. We left shortly after. The staff at the Orpheum laughed hartily again that we didn't make it beyond one song. But we saw all we needed to see.

17. First tattoo or piercing?

pierced my left ear once, in high school, and wore it as a badge of coolness in high school. Towards the end of college got another stud in the same ear lobe and then stopped wearing them and certainly didn't get tattoos. My ethos became that a real artist or a true rocker doesn't need to do the obvious things, like crazy clothes and haircuts, in order to be good and great and to rock. In hindsight, I think I may have been wrong. Still, I'm against any jewelry on a man - rings, chains, necklaces, piercings, etc. - you can be a bad-ass simply by the way that you roll, not any of those external adornments.

18. First celebrity crush?

Marsha Brady (or whoever played her - Susan McCormick?)....she was the bossy older sister, but also a total waif and babe with attitude. And she dealt with guys like me, the younger two Brady boys. She became the "IT" girl

19. Age of first real kiss and with who?

18, already after high school (the horror), on Marthas Vinyard, in my once-in-a-lifetime moment of having cajones, I drunkenly took by the hand a very pretty Lola Clementine out to the porch of the house, and we proceeded to suck face for what seemed like ages. I even kissed bit of nuts out of her mouth that she had previously been snacking on. The next day I told her I had never kissed anyone before her.

20. First crush?

had little ones here and there but none were too real because I was too shy to speak with any girls I found attractive, the more attractive the less chance I'd ever talk to them - a crush means more than just leering, though I still try to ignore that rule.

21. First love?

Julie Levitz-Hammer, first everything, the high school femme fatale, she made boys into men and every dude in Brookline was obsessed with her - we were together and now there's no contact. She calls herself Julia now and probably has a kid and husband and has cut herself off, unsurprisingly, from her lurid, steamy, and yet innocent history... where ever you are now Julie, I luvz ya still!