Lies, Lies, Lies… Yeah Yeah

ASK #36: LIES, LIES, LIES, YEAH YEAH

“Although I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes as chance.” Shakespeare

This is an excellent week to talk about lying. Because either Dr. Ford or Kavanaugh was lying. I don’t buy Trump’s statement that it was a case of mistaken identity, because I got laid for the first time on August 17th, 1979, and no matter that 39 years have passed, and in that time I’ve consumed enough alcohol to fill a good-sized swimming pool, not to mention a copious amount of marijuana,and had sex with other women, and moved four times, I know who the woman was, and what she looked like. Period.

So I think I know who was lying.

But lying isn’t confined to Supreme Court confirmation hearings. No…lying is as much a part of lives as eating.

We lie, we lie, we lie. We tell white lies, and black ones. We lie to spare someone’s feelings, we lie for expediency’s sake, we lie by omission, we lie to be diplomatic, we lie to get out of trouble, we lie to be mean. We lie to friends, family, business associates, wives and children–and most ignobly, we lie to ourselves.

I tried to figure out how much I lied during a week. It turned out that I lied so much that the only way to organize the list was to group them by location. I lied at Home: to my son, who wanted to borrow twenty bucks to see a movie, and I told him that I was broke, but I wasn’t–I was just being cheap. I told my wife that this blouse she bought looked good on her, and it didn’t, not by a mile, and I didn’t tell her about an agonizing chest pain I had, because I didn’t want to hear her give me shit about it, so that was a lie by omission. I lied to to my friend who wanted me to go to a baseball game, but I didn’t, so I made up some desperate story…

I lied at work. I lied to my boss about an assignment that I was supposed to finish; I lied to a co-worker who was desperate to be promoted. I told her that she would be, no problem, which was b.s. because she is an incompetent hack who may never get promoted. I nearly tore my neck off craning to look at this legal assistant’s ass but when my wife saw her at the annual Christmas party and said, “she’s cute…” I looked at my wife like she was bat-shit crazy and said, “her?”, and gave her the face I use when I want her to think that something is so absurd that I wouldn’t even comment on it…

I lie at the gym, the post office and even at church. As a matter of fact, my priest has heard my most outlandish, but creative, lies.

Not one of these lies were that big in the scheme of things. They weren’t lies to keep me out of jail, they were just everyday lies.

And by the way, in most of those cases I would do it again.

And then there’s the BIG LIE (drumroll please). The one that you keep in a secret place. Don’t bother saying that you don’t have one. You do. The one you don’t like thinking about. The one you wouldn’t tell your mother, your wife…or your best friend.

I won’t tell you MY BIG LIE because that’s not the point of this task. But I will give you an example. One night, filled to the gills with gin, a friend of mine made a startling revelation: when he was young he witnessed a brutal assault, but my friend did not want to get involved, so he never said a word. The victim, his friend, asked him–and he lied. He lied to the police and to his parents, and he told us that night that a day hasn’t passed that he doesn’t feel shitty about it. The BIG LIE.

TASK

Write down every lie that you tell this week. Every one of them. And that includes the lies by omission. Write them in your notebook.

And take a piece of paper and write down your BIG LIE. Write it down and explain it. Stare at it for a minute, then burn the paper or tear it up and throw it away.

Photos by Joe Doe; and Kristina Flour on Unsplash