Stop Calling Fiction a Lie

What's the difference between lies and hyperbole? Lying is wrong, but hyperbole is the worst thing ever.

One pernicious hyperbole is that fiction is a lie. The truth is that fiction is untruth, and if that confuses you, welcome to my job. My grandfather believed fiction was a pack of lies, and even tried to talk me out writing the one time he drove me back home from Liberal Arts college. Over burned toast and runny eggs, he argued that someday society would recognize that novels and movies were feeding us falsehood and that we should only deal with facts and non-fiction.

That's what I hear when people joke about writers as high-paid liars. If anything, the lie is that most of us are paid very much. Lies and fiction are two kinds of untruth that are little alike.

Lies are non-consensual. You speak misinformation under the assumption the other person doesn't know better. Your kid doesn't know there isn't a Santa Claus, but you want to fool him, for fun, or to get his mind off a chronic illness. The IRS doesn't know how much money you've hidden under the table, and you want to deceive its agents to get away with paying less. A lie is your decision without the informed agency of the other person.

You and I Will Ruin X-Files

If one thing ruins this X-Files revival, it will be us. It won't be Chris Carter's zany and plodding scripts - you liked that twenty years ago. It's not the actors aging - Gillian Anderson has only gained more gravitas with time. No, we've changed. We've changed in a way that can screw this up for us.

I had a great time watching the premiere last night. It captured the unabashed hokeyness of the original series, a willingness to believe things that no one in my social groups does. It is once again a show about Belief and Plot getting along much better than they do in reality. It is once again an escape from the way things are, an itch only Welcome to Night Vale scratches for me these days.

But people got furious over the New World Order conspiracies that flooded the episode. They were angry that the show wasn't doing "better" than Alex Jones and Glenn Beck. Jones and Beck are contemptible in real life, but X-Files is not The Wire. It performs a different function. From the first episode when Mulder spray-painted an X on the street and gauged how much time a flash of light made him lose, it's been about indulging in tinfoil hat thinking.

Last night's premiere was remarkably faithful. The X-Files didn't change. We did.

Five Phases of Tragedy - #fridayflash

Phase 1

Helen finally tries out for the school play. Danny and Asia hate theatre, but go to her audition anyway, and cheer like it's a conference football game when she's cast as ___. ___ is the role that shall never be spoke of again starting Friday. No one else wants to play ___ because of the costume, with the straps that nobody can figure out are supposed to stay up.

Phase 2

Helen is electric as ___ for two minutes and ten seconds, before the straps come apart like overcooked pasta. Hundreds of people, including, Helen's mother, her brother and the Honors Bio teacher she has a crush on, see her topless. Her life is over.

Asia has an idea to resurrect her. She's watching with Danny on the catwalk.

Phase 3

Running through the hallway, Helen sees a cell phone streaming video of her impromptu topless scene. Her shame is already a Vine.

Danny snags Helen's elbow, hauls her into the empty English classroom, and gives her his jacket. Helen sobs and begs Danny and Asia to never speak of the stupid role again. Danny promises to, and is halfway through promising to replace the name with a blank line if he ever sees it again, when Asia strips off her jeans, and then down to a neon orange bra and thong that her friends never expected she was capable of wearing. With equal fervor, she begs Helen to go streaking with her.

"We have to own this before it owns you," she explains, casing the hallway for adults who might impede seizing the day.

Phase 4

Helen is mocked ceaselessly, on Facebook, the street, and in every glance she gets in school. Asia's plan failed and now the two of them are a school meme - Thesbians.

She keeps taking bathroom breaks from class to cry, and Danny refuses to let her go alone, and so is eventually sent to Detention for going into the Girls' bathroom. He becomes part of the meme before his sentence is served, and Asia and Helen wait up for him afterward to break the news. Asia mocks him for being the biggest Thesbian of all until Helen smiles and agrees to pizza.

Phase 5

Asia is asleep, half on top of the pizza boxes and half beneath the futon, even though she's the one who asked to watch Pacific Rim for a second time in one night. Helen is on her way to sleep, dozing off against Danny's bony right arm as giant robots defend the world. She means to ask what he thought of Asia's dumb streaking plan, and then sees down the back of his khakis and realizes he isn't wearing underwear.

Drowsy, she makes a joke about it.

Then it's part of them.

Bathroom Monologue: Never Forget How to be Alone

It's long after the club has closed, and the Funny Man stands on the circular stage, one of the nicest he's ever seen, even though it's too dark to make out much more than its purple plastic cover bunching over oak boards. The seats are all empty, cushions collapsed upwards and into their seatbacks, the only things in the world the Funny Man knows of that collapse upward.

He makes a joke about it. Two people in the front row chuckle, and he bends to his haunches, looking them in eyes that aren't there for a follow-up. Laughter ripples in the seats around them.

He's working the crowd, feet already shuffling, smoothing out the purple plastic cover. It becomes his playing field, his circular baseball diamond, and he paces the bases as he likens politics to foul balls. The Funny Man raises three fingers in a gesture like no one else he knows has ever done, saluting into an imaginary outfield, and back rows clap with amusement. The Funny Man has never been comfortable with audiences applauding rather than laughing at comedy; he is there to be enjoyed, not agreed with. Yet he can't deny the warm feedback, the adulation radiating from a packed house. No one is even complaining how dim it is.

He asks, who decided to run a show in the dark? And the two people he started on in the front row are wheezing with laughter and clutching their ribs. He riffs on the dark theatre, the darkness of night, scary places that aren't lit well enough, for minutes upon minutes, until he regrets not having set up a camera to record a special live from the dark circle with its purple plastic cover.

Then he riffs off wishing he had a crowd like his for his live-to-tape special. Then he riffs off live-to-tape. Then he riffs off of Youtube, Son of America's Funniest Home Videos, and then what the Daughter of America's Funniest Home Videos would look like, and how the internet leaves no man unconnected. It's on that word, "unconnected," that a car alarm blares up through a window and his audience dampens, and thins, and three blinks later, dispels down the drain of imagination.

Four blinks later, there are no cushions that collapse upward. There is only the private theatre of his kitchen. He steps off the circular dining table, dropping to the floor and straightening the plastic table cloth. It's purple. It's not made of cloth, he thinks. He thinks that would make good material.

He has not forgotten how to be alone.

Bathroom Monologue: Retweet This

RETWEETs are perfect. There has never been a better form of communication, and never phrased better, or I would have written it. Instead I clicked RETWEET and my work is done. The world is mended.

I believe every single word and the implicit meaning behind every single image attached to whatever I RETWEET. Its politics are mine. Its opinions are law. The only thing I would change is making it my work.

I have never RETWEETed something by accident.

My Twitter clients have never malfunctioned and RETWEETed something without my consent.

I have never RETWEETed something so my peers would like me better. I have never done anything so my peers would like me better. I think ties have unmatched utility.

I have never RETWEETed something I disagreed with to show what the opposition thinks. In all those cases, I have never tweeted shortly before or after that, granting the RETWEET context. Every RETWEET is its own island of unquestioning support.

RETWEET this.