"You've got to protect yourself," he tells me.
Ho hum, doesn't everyone.
"You write about easily identifiable people in your blogs, embellishing them, adding descriptions and dialogue that never took place, right?"
"Right, just as I told you," I said.
"Well, some of them might not appreciate your embellishments, feel offended, complain, sue, g_d forbid shoot you, then what?"
"Well, I survived one small incident with a gym staffer, I'll survive the rest."
I told him about the fiction of W.G Sebald, which reads like a memoir, and that this style is what guided me too. The 'I' in Sebald was not really himself, and the 'I' in my blogs is not entirely myself either.
"I'm not writing a diary, man, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to get started - I had to think up the form and the content. You know, some of these characters are invented out of whole cloth. I might even invent you."
"Not funny," he said.
"Well, after all you're a lawyer, counselor," I replied. We know each other well enough to engage in a little teasing.
"You need to put a disclaimer in your blog posts," he said, his eyes signalling lawyerly seriousness.
"Like this?" I opened a book I was holding and showed him the following:
DISCLAIMER: The following is a work of fiction, and any resemblance between the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental.
He studied it slowly, then said: "That's a particularly weak one, but yes, something like it."
We finished without agreeing on anything, and I headed to work meditating on Friday the 13th, and on the lucky penny I found yesterday while thinking about someone special, and if it would bring better luck than the pennies I kept finding in previous months.
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