Lying At An Early Age

False:  Untrue, not factual, factually incorrect.

I had a friend send me a cache of old letters that I had sent to him when I was still drinking and, quite obviously, smoking an absolute shitload of weed.  I waded into the correspondence, expecting a brilliant mother lode of early insight and wisdom.

Yeah, well, right.  There's a mother lode of something there, alright, most of which is flush-worthy.  If this is what I perceived as correspondence when I was running and gunning then it's no wonder I didn't have too many friends.  About half of this stuff consists of me transcribing the most depressing lyrics from the most depressing songs I could find.  There is also an incredible amount of outright lying.  I can only hope that I believed that the stories I was making up were transparently false, otherwise I'm embarrassed at my behavior.  These were falsehoods.

Then I stuck this in the middle of one of the letters: "When life is over it's like a flicker of  bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illuminated for an instant in space, and before you could cry out: 'There was a happy day, there was a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,' the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dead."

Juan Ramon Jimenez: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."