fibs

everything I believe is a lie.

well, sort of. I've got this thing about truth. You can have it--my thing about the truth--because I'm not really using it. It goes like this:

we're all born liars. lucky thing too, or we'd all end up in a place like this. we need our lies because they're the things that spare us, prepare us, and endear us. and the best thing about lies, is that they can become true if we follow through on them.

i stopped lying to get out of trouble when i was just a kid because it made me feel like there was something about myself i needed to hide. couldn't stand it. as a result i found that people respect you more for telling the truth and that life is far more interesting when you 'fess up to the things you've done wrong. you get through more doors, i find, when you're humble enough to admit the things you've done wrong.

it's amazing, also, how your choices change when you don't acknowledge lying as an option for covering up your errors in judgement. it's uncomfortable at first, limiting yourself that way, but hey "the truth will set you free."

except that it doesn't. not in the contemporary sense of freedom. in fact, i'd go so far as to say that our culture's concept of freedom is just shy of anarchy and has nothing to do with the notion of liberty that formed the basis of Enlightenment thought and politics. oddly enough, those notions have a lot to do with the pursuit of truth: truth about knowledge, truth about God, truth about justice, truth about whatever. nope, truth nowadays really hinders freedom. it makes it harder to get a job, harder to find a mate, harder to be happy. so, instead we lie.

truth, as i think of it, is tenuous and based on interpretation and reception and our culturally-determined perspective. in short, truth is a lie because it's never the same for any two people; what's true for you isn't necessarily true for me. which is okay really, because most of the lies we tell are the ones that we want to be true, or the things we need to believe just to get through the day.

she loves me.
i'm not fat.
every little thing's going to be all right.

our best lies are stories. they're the lies that we grew up with that help us unpack the baggage we acquire as we move through the world. we use these lies to reconcile things that shouldn't be with the way we want them to be. our stories start out as lies and billow into a white screen on the inside of the back of our heads onto which the world is projected through our eyes. there are plenty of bad stories, to be sure, but we can always learn better ones and we can always choose to tell better stories. if the truth won't set us free, at least we're at liberty to lie.

maybe it's time i started telling lies that could help us all get out of the trouble we're in.

or maybe we just need a little more music...

"all my lies are only wishes"