That was my night, thanks, getting screwed by insomnia.

I had a minor blood sugar crash and then had racing thoughts. This “new direction” is worrying me. I’ve had lots of talks with my pal Christa Faust about this sort of thing. People prefer nonfiction to fiction, it seems, and it’s nuts. Personally, I prefer to read fiction. I like a good story. People’s lives rarely make good stories. They’re too self-involved in the telling and almost never honest. Of course, humor is a whole ‘nother dish o’ p’sketti, but still one type of “storytelling” doesn’t lend to the other.

Last year, there was a young (WTF?) memoir writer* who went on Letterman and is now a professional screenwriter — not because she knows how to write a good tale, I’d bet my booties, but rather because she wrote a lurid tell-all memoir about being a stripper in Minnesota for 18 months. She also wrote a thinly fictionalized blog about her office and sex life, and supposedly has another memoir about her teenage angst.

How horrifying is that? Actually, what sickens me more is this quote from her memoir: “I was never molested as a child, probably because I wasn’t very attractive.”

Yeah, and probably every sexual abuse survivor I know would respond, “Die in a fire, you stupid, fucking bitch.”

What’s worse is that she just wrote a film that was produced and is writing a new sitcom. I guess Hollywood has always liked that kind of stupifying, head-up-the-ass mentality, so why complain? And to be fair to The Machine, the products of these sorts of people make money, apparently.

I don’t want to be lumped with intellectual vagrants like this. I don’t care if she’s popular. Man, I don’t care if her first piss each morning is gold. It ain’t right.

The thing is, I won’t be like “that.” You know this. I know this. I’m older, smarter, more talented. I’ve always wanted to write about my family as part of the greater dialog going on right now about religion. It’s a major thread in the bigger moral debate. And I want to enter that broader dialog. I did in my query to Bitch magazine yesterday, where I pitched an article about The Blasphemy Challenge. I want to entertain with good stories, but I also want to debate.

And that, dear friends, is what was going through my head at around 4:32 a.m. Over and over. Round and round.

Now, I’m going to write.

*If y’all can’t Google Fu this, just email me. I’m simply reluctant to give her link space here.