"DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ" or "READ BETWEEN THE LINES

This past week, I was visiting my step-brother in San Diego. He works a lot, so I spent a fair amount of time with his eleven year-old daughter, Stacy. Stacy’s big hobby is reading the rags they sell next to checkout stands at the supermarket. So all of Saturday, I kept hearing, “Uncle Jack, Demi is pregnant with Ashton’s Kid,” or “Katie is leaving Tom because you’re not allowed to eat chicken if you’re a scientologist and her aunt owns a chick ranch.”

I told her that none of that was true, that Tom and Katie were quite happy, but she asked, “If it’s not true, why is it in the paper?” I told her about sourcing material and the laws of libel, but her only response was, “Nick and Jessica are getting a divorce.” Thank God.

But it made think about how much I bought into, just because I read it somewhere or saw it somewhere. An old New York senator, Preston Brummagem, once said “the encyclopedia is full of facts as long as you want to read them.” He was talking about his stance on education, but it could also be seen as a point on gullibility.

I knew this girl that thought everything in “The Da Vinci Code” was true. I would just look at her and shake my head. Then again, I was in junior high before I knew that the WWF was scripted. But I was only thirteen and she was twenty-two.

And I’m not trying to downplay Faith or the belief of fairytales, I’m just wondering when do stories become fact and vice versa. Thaddeus Palterson, a 1930’s science fiction writer said that he wrote “true stories that just hadn’t happened yet.” So who’s to say what isn’t true now, won’t be in thirty years or so.

But how much of my life, or my own personality is based on lies that I watched on TV or read in some magazine. Our present self is made up of the experiences of our past self, and what if those experiences are lies? I saw this Japanese horror movie called “False Remembrances” about a man that was haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. He thought he killed her and kept running from the cops. In the end , we find that his dead wife was not haunting him, but warning him about who really did kill her. Of course, it was too late and he died by the real murderer’s hands. But through out the movie, he slowly accepted the fact that he killed his wife and was planning to kill again.

I know this is all pretty dumb, but more and more of my friends are having kids. I was planning on lying to each and everyone. Tell them stories about How there was no gravity until Newton invented it or how the Mallard and the beaver had a child and it was so ugly that they sent it to Australia, and that’s where we get the platypus. But after hanging out with Stacy for a weekend… I don’t know.

One last quote, then I’m done, The silver-age comic writer Stanley Jenkins once said, “I know I’m writing fiction, but it doesn’t mean kids can’t believe in what I’m writing.”