Monday, July 15, 2013

Anatomy of a Lie

Liars are easy to expose. Sometimes it's just because the lie is absolutely ridiculous: "Someone spilled a case of hot sauce so I couldn't move so that's why I made you wait 30 minutes for me to check out at Costco."  Wow.  You poor thing.  Surrounded by a sea of hot sauce, or too stupid to figure out how to turn the cart around and go the other way?  Or, just a bad liar?

This is about a different lie.  When I returned home after getting out of the hospital I wondered why some of my neighbors looked shocked when they saw me. There was a lie behind the shock, but I'll go to the back story first.

A few years earlier I was awakened from a nap by violent pounding on my door.  A former friend was there, in a panic, with the explanation that she was sure that I had fallen and hit my head.  A real out-of-the-blue fantasy that one, since I had never had a history of falling.  Of course, if she had any little bit of courtesy she would have called first before coming over, but even little bits of courtesy weren't in her usual routine.

Fast forward to after I came home.  Like I said, neighbors were giving me odd, startled looks.  Finaly one neighbor without a "filter" told me that everyone had been told that I had suffered head trauma and died.

See the pattern of the "tragic heroine"?  I suspect that she told this lie when someone wondered why she was toting the things of mine that she wanted to keep out of my house. However, it's easy to determine where the "head trauma" lie came from.

Clue for compulsive liars:  Don't stick with the same themes. 

"No mas patalones!"