The internet is populated by many frauds and charlatans. This is a well-established fact. Therefore, I’m not going to give you any information here about myself. Instead, I’m going to give you some advice.
Ignore any and all of the information offered to you directly and without solicitation, and don’t solicit information from strangers unless you have a way to verify the integrity of the information by a separate mechanism. When an anonymous stranger writes information in his or her blog or web site, there is little hope that you will ever know whether that information is factual, an exaggeration, a joke, or a deliberate and calculated attempt to deceive. That doesn’t mean that it’s a lie, or that it’s incorrect, or any of those things. But a wise person should be aware that it might be.
The one thing that is true–but unfortunately it’s not a simple truth–is that you can tell a lot about a person not so much by what they write but what he or she chooses to write about and how he or she expresses his or her thoughts. For example, I could mention that I’m a curmudgeonly, forty-something, overweight guy. I might be telling a complete lie–I might actually be a sweet, beautiful nineteen-year-old girl with nothing but romance on her mind (although this would be the opposite of the way things usually work, from what I’ve heard). You don’t know. You might never know. But two things you do know are that I want you to think of me as a curmudgeonly middle-aged guy, and that somewhere I picked up the word curmudgeon and thought this would be a good time to show it off.
I grant you that this probably isn’t very useful information, but it’s 100% accurate. So just preface all my statements with “The author wants me to believe that” and you’ll be OK.
Of course, I might just want you to think that I’m giving you good advice, while in fact the advice is terrible. You’re going to have to figure that out for yourself.
Now we get to the complicated bit. While you are worrying about me being a fraud and/or charlatan, I also have some doubts about you. I’m sorry, but since the door is always open on my blog, I don’t really know who is going to come wandering in, and therefore I must be somewhat on my guard. Some of you are simply anonymous strangers–or, as I like to say, anonymous, faceless friends I haven’t met yet and probably never will outside of cyberspace. Some of you are actual friends from the real world, or both the real world and cyberspace. The better you know me, the easiest it will be to tell when I’m lying or distorting the truth.
I’m planning to lie or distort the truth quite frequently on this blog, but only in very specific ways, primarily in order to protect the particulars of my identity, and personal information of myself, my family and relatives, and loved ones. For example, if I make a blog entry telling the story of some shenanigans that my daughter and her best friend Helen had as they walked down Sherman Street on their way to school, you can be sure of two things–the name of my daughters best friend is not Helen, and she doesn’t walk down Sherman Street on her way to school. Perhaps I don’t even have a grade-school-aged daughter at all, although it would be profoundly strange for me to write so many blog entries about an entirely fictional character.
I may also exaggerate or distort the details of some events in order to increase the entertainment value of a story. For example, it simply sounds more interesting and literary to say that my wife’s snoring sounds like an unmuffled, rusty chainsaw being used to cut through a jersey barrier during a thunderstorm, when in reality her snoring more accurately resembles the sound of a well-maintained chainsaw being used to clear-cut a forest of young, supple pine trees on a sunny spring day. Perhaps the tendency to embellish and tweak simply runs in my family; for example, the stories my mother tells about me as a baby keep getting more and more interesting (and embarrassing) with each passing year. When I was a teenager my mother used to tell my prospective girlfriends that once I ate a dog biscuit (because all evidence suggested that the culinary tastes of our dog and my personal tastes were highly congruent, and therefore something so immensely enjoyed by the dog must be worth a try), but now, some three decades later, the story has grown in richness and my wife has been informed that dog food was my staple food as a boy. In any case, I consider this sort of fibbing as an element of poetic license, so you might as well get used to it.
A third situation that leads to the appearance of lying is that sometimes I simply get the facts wrong, in which case I don’t even know that I’m lying.
If you catch me intentionally lying, or accidentally telling the truth, I would appreciate it if you just kept it to yourself.
