Enough About Me, What Do You Think of Me?

Okay, so I’m a hurricane. Big deal. We all have our faults.

Meanwhile. I’ve been wanting to mention for days, but other subjects kept intervening – the proofs for Why Truth Matters have arrived. Jeremy got his Tuesday, my set arrived Wednesday – on account of how he’s a few miles from Continuum and I’m six thousand miles farther off.

We had a little discussion about the acknowledgements. Gremlins had replaced that page with the acknowledgements from a previous book of Jeremy’s and Julian’s, one that I had nothing to do with. (It would have been even funnier if it had been replaced with the acknowledgements from a book by someone entirely unknown to any of us, thanking a great crowd of people we’ve never heard of, for doing things neither of us would ever dream of doing in our most inebriated or gangrenously delirious moments, such as being helpful or patient or cheerful or pleasant.) Those acknowledgements thanked me for help with the editing – therefore would have looked rather odd in a book I co-wrote. One doesn’t usually thank oneself in the acknowledgements – although it might not be a bad idea. Who else is going to do such a thorough job of it, after all?

And finally, I would like to thank Myself, for being so unfailingly amusing, so inexhaustibly interesting, for shutting up when I needed quiet, for chattering when I needed distraction, for knowing exactly when to moan and whine and fuss, when to shout and rail and execrate, when to smirk and gloat and prance, when to titter and squeal and dribble; for knowing exactly when I wanted to eat something and when I didn’t, when I needed to go for a long walk and when I needed to lie on the floor and breathe deeply. For always being there, for sympathizing so deeply, for admiring so unreservedly, for knowing so well exactly what was wrong about everyone else and right about me.

But I hadn’t thought of that on Wednesday, so I merely suggested a smaller re-write: ‘Special thanks to Jeremy Stangroom for writing some of it, special thanks to Ophelia Benson for writing some of it.’ Jeremy suggested an alternative: ‘Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom would like to thank Ophelia Benson and
Jeremy Stangroom for making the world a better place.’ I think that’s an excellent sentiment, and that we should add it to the front page of B&W.

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