Fibberies I've Committed
I like to think I'm pretty honest at this point in my life. Especially if you ask me a direct question. I may not go out of my way to break painful news to you, as I've realized that at some point in the past I used honesty as an excuse for bitchery. But I will tell you that your joke isn't funny or confirm that, yes, your eyeballs were pecked out by crows in the middle of the night and replaced with giant marbles filled with googly eyes.
And I can't participate in ongoing deceptions. I will never Punk you. Nor throw you a surprise birthday party. Good or bad, it ties my intestines in squirmy bows. I can't even watch TV shows where the main character is in the dark about something the audience knows.
OK, so now that you know I'm a pretentious fuqtouch who lives up in a virginal tower of unabashed truth.
Here are some horrible lies I've told in the past.
1. In 2nd grade, I was desperate to be famous. Well, not so much desperate as... eagerly awaiting, with complete certainty of the eventual nature of this fact. I wasn't quite yet dreaming of glamorous things like teendom. I was still too consumed with writing poetry about extremely relevant and universal topics like "Freedom".
Excerpted from my postmortem collection of juvenalia:
(Selected stanzas from)
Freedom
by Lynn Bixenspan
In this land
You can stand
Up
For what you believe in.
You might even win.
In this land
there will always be justice.
Whether the name is Mary
or Augustus.
It's all clear
Very near
Never fear.
Freedom.
- - -
I know. It's pretty amazing that an 8-year-old was tackling this topic with such incisive ... incision. Words that cut with the precision of a surgeon, right into the heart of a nation. That's a metaphor. A simile uses "like" or "as". Don't confuse the two. Thanks.
OK, though, seriously, Augustus is clearly a Latino man. Mary is clearly an Anglo-Saxon woman. But here in America, they both receive the exact same treatment. That's something to be proud of.
Proud enough to lie about in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.
My teacher announced that she was submitting it to the Martin Luther King Day Poetry Contest. Youths from all over America would vie for the prizes of up to $50.
I had no doubt in my mind that I would emerge victorious from this battle. I seriously had no concept in my mind of the prospect of defeat. I was the Smartest Kid in Lido Elementary School. And the Best Writer. I had my own 4th-grade language arts workbook. THAT I DID, UNSUPERVISED. This is no fuckaround. I was on some Doogie junk.
So, prematurely, I told my mom that I had won. Not a lie, just an early revelation. She was proud and happy, of course.
The next day in school, over the loudspeaker, they announced the results. I was already preparing my clapped-at-face. No big deal. Just par for the course for the Smartest Kid in School.
"...1st place, Damian Marley, 5th grade. Congratulations!"
There had to be some mistake.
Should I ask Mrs. Lieb what had happened? Maybe she forgot to send mine in.
No, I would just accept that there had been a mistake.
And when my mom asked me later that day where she could read the poem, naturally I would say:
"The winning poems were published in 3-2-1- Contact Magazine."
Why? Why add to the lie with something that could clearly be proven false?
I don't know. Why did the guy on tonight's edition of Crime Story lie and say that he had dropped his mail-order Russian bride off in Moscow when the airline records would clearly reveal that she HAD, in fact, come in to the US, which would then lead eventually to the police uncovering her body in a shallow grave on an Indian reservation 25 miles north of Seattle, with her bony hand sticking out of the dirt, as if crying out for help, clutching at one last hope?
The criminal mind is. diabolical.
I quickly ran to my room and hid every issue of 3-2-1 Contact Magazine deep into the disgusting moldy recesses of my closet.
She could never know I had lied. It would break her.
But yet, I continued on this path throughout the year.
And the lies just got bigger.
And I can't participate in ongoing deceptions. I will never Punk you. Nor throw you a surprise birthday party. Good or bad, it ties my intestines in squirmy bows. I can't even watch TV shows where the main character is in the dark about something the audience knows.
OK, so now that you know I'm a pretentious fuqtouch who lives up in a virginal tower of unabashed truth.
Here are some horrible lies I've told in the past.
1. In 2nd grade, I was desperate to be famous. Well, not so much desperate as... eagerly awaiting, with complete certainty of the eventual nature of this fact. I wasn't quite yet dreaming of glamorous things like teendom. I was still too consumed with writing poetry about extremely relevant and universal topics like "Freedom".
Excerpted from my postmortem collection of juvenalia:
(Selected stanzas from)
Freedom
by Lynn Bixenspan
In this land
You can stand
Up
For what you believe in.
You might even win.
In this land
there will always be justice.
Whether the name is Mary
or Augustus.
It's all clear
Very near
Never fear.
Freedom.
- - -
I know. It's pretty amazing that an 8-year-old was tackling this topic with such incisive ... incision. Words that cut with the precision of a surgeon, right into the heart of a nation. That's a metaphor. A simile uses "like" or "as". Don't confuse the two. Thanks.
OK, though, seriously, Augustus is clearly a Latino man. Mary is clearly an Anglo-Saxon woman. But here in America, they both receive the exact same treatment. That's something to be proud of.
Proud enough to lie about in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.
My teacher announced that she was submitting it to the Martin Luther King Day Poetry Contest. Youths from all over America would vie for the prizes of up to $50.
I had no doubt in my mind that I would emerge victorious from this battle. I seriously had no concept in my mind of the prospect of defeat. I was the Smartest Kid in Lido Elementary School. And the Best Writer. I had my own 4th-grade language arts workbook. THAT I DID, UNSUPERVISED. This is no fuckaround. I was on some Doogie junk.
So, prematurely, I told my mom that I had won. Not a lie, just an early revelation. She was proud and happy, of course.
The next day in school, over the loudspeaker, they announced the results. I was already preparing my clapped-at-face. No big deal. Just par for the course for the Smartest Kid in School.
"...1st place, Damian Marley, 5th grade. Congratulations!"
There had to be some mistake.
Should I ask Mrs. Lieb what had happened? Maybe she forgot to send mine in.
No, I would just accept that there had been a mistake.
And when my mom asked me later that day where she could read the poem, naturally I would say:
"The winning poems were published in 3-2-1- Contact Magazine."
Why? Why add to the lie with something that could clearly be proven false?
I don't know. Why did the guy on tonight's edition of Crime Story lie and say that he had dropped his mail-order Russian bride off in Moscow when the airline records would clearly reveal that she HAD, in fact, come in to the US, which would then lead eventually to the police uncovering her body in a shallow grave on an Indian reservation 25 miles north of Seattle, with her bony hand sticking out of the dirt, as if crying out for help, clutching at one last hope?
The criminal mind is. diabolical.
I quickly ran to my room and hid every issue of 3-2-1 Contact Magazine deep into the disgusting moldy recesses of my closet.
She could never know I had lied. It would break her.
But yet, I continued on this path throughout the year.
And the lies just got bigger.
posted by Lynn @ 1:49 AM
0 Comments
