Never Tell The Truth...

When young, my path to the future was carefully defined.  I would join the Cleveland Police Department in Ohio and marry my girlfriend.  I didn’t score high enough to be hired in the first wave and subsequent hires were slowed with affirmative action lawsuits.  The year, was 1971. Fate took me to Michigan and a career in corrections, counting convicts. My former girlfriend did well, enjoyed a career in the airline industry and married a nice fella, while I put several tavern owner’s children through college and had a successful career.  I eventually, attained a lofty position where I could tell others how to count convicts correctly, while ensuring their confinement.

 

Fast forward from my twenties to my sixties where I sit back and enjoy the knowledge and wisdom that comes with age.  For instance, I realize I am no more aware of reality today than forty years ago. I have courageously stared enlightenment squarely in the eye and ignored it.  I have scoffed at life’s lessons and marched in a well worn circle, awaiting a new dawn upon my next lap. Collecting my attributes and inclinations toward the mundane, I  chose for my next adventure, politics.

 

I have always boasted a proficiency for telling lies and at a young age adopted  a friend’s motto of, “never tell the truth if a good lie will do.” Prevarication  however, has not always been considered an admirable attribute. Only the ‘old heads’ will remember this, but purposely telling an untruth was once frowned on.  Openly spewing lies on a local or national platform that were obviously lies and immediately refutable, was reason for confinement under mental illness statutes.  In the past, fellow liars, found out, were disgraced and unceremoniously cut from the herd. A teller of untruths today, when exposed, not only ignores any admonishment to cease and desist but incorporates the fiction to his/her repertoire and shouts it all the louder.  A pathological liar is most often blessed with persistence, that allows telling of the tale to outlast most arguments.

 

Therein lies my problem.  Once able to boast being the finest liar in the land, (eight square blocks of northeastern Ohio) I’ve been proven a charleton, a fraud, good lord, here in the big leagues I may as well tell the truth.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve never been pushed that far. Oh sure, I can’t help but lie to the woman in my life. I still joyfully reminisce winning the state championship in wrestling, back in Ohio, with the fella’s at the corner tavern.  As the years go by, I’ve put my final match, down to a twenty three second pin. I’ve had a decided advantage, that none of my drinking chums have picked up a book in decades and couldn’t tell you where the local library is. However, the onset of Google has placed a crimp of sorts, in my story telling.  My friends are non-judgemental souls and nothing forgives a multitude of sins, like a firm and resolute, “give us all one.”