I am impaled upon the horns of a dilemma. When I write about things that are True, everybody thinks I’m making it up. When I post utterly absurd fiction, I apparently give the impression that it is True. This is my burden, a true no-win situation. Roped around my neck like Coleridge’s unfortunate albatross I find: The Truth.  While this may seem a lighter burden than some putrid, pelagic procellariiform it, in fact, weighs me down heavier than the anchor carried by the unfortunate mariner’s ship. It all comes down to wanting to avoid the Truth. That’s why I took up writing fiction. 

The problem with the Truth is that it’s just so real. And, unfortunately for me, is intimately associated with this whole blogging thing. I write this in the first person and it seems that many of my readers expect the words related herein to be an accurate, more-or-less complete, and, above all, Truthful retelling of the entertaining vignettes that make up the day-to-day of my life.

That is not the case.

I have referred on any number of occasions to my second posting Truth Be Told in which I pretty much set forth the ground-rules for this blogging endeavor. Either some of you have ignored the hint and not rushed away to read it or I must have been even more obtuse in that blog than I thought. On top of that, I sprinkle these offerings with what should be considered nothing less than warnings regarding the Truthfulness of what I’m writing. But no, still the comments and emails pour in and so, I must, with this posting, finally come clean and set the record straight.

People, I’m just making this stuff up.

As I wrote in the aforementioned posting Truth Be Told – which can be considered another suggestion that, if you already haven’t, to go and read the thing – I often start a blog with a particular real, honest-to-God, thing that I have experienced or thought or read about. This starting point is typically the onlyfactual part of the whole story. After that I just let my mind wander and see what fanciful results I can come up with. Sometimes this can be an entertaining little piece like You Don’t Say and sometimes it ends in a pathetic attempt to fill up some pages by Friday morning like last week’s A Quick Spin Around the Block. Not coincidentally, it is those two pieces that are the focus of my current problem.

To address this I must venture into conundrum-space and do two things I find particularly loathsome. First, I’ve got to share with you something that really happened – the problem itself, and second, I’ve got to actually explain the two blogs in question –something I promised myself I’d never do. First, let’s do a quick summary. In You Don’t Say I talked about how a writer can hide one story within another and layer the narrative with complexities to give the story some depth. To illustrate this I invented the story of Carl and Lupe, two hopeless romantics, and used their experiences as examples of the ways a writer can add depth to a story. In the end I tried to leave it with some uncertainty about whether Carl and Lupe are, as I claimed, real and to try, by adding this ambiguity, give the story a more generic appeal for the hopeless romantic in all of us. Yeah, whatever. There is exactly one fact I started from for that blog posting: Carl and Lupe are actual people and their story really is so sickeningly sappy, sophomoric, and saccharine-laden that it makes me want to throw up. I took their oh-so-Sleepless-in-Seattle relationship and expanded it. I couched the whole thing in a kind of things I do as a writer cover story, which was also mostly made up, and from those humble threads I cut from whole cloth the fictional weaving that was that blog post. Other than Carl and Lupe being real and in a googoo-eyed relationship, the rest is completely and utterly false.

Which brings us up to last week and the follow up to Carl and Lupe’s story which caused all the problems. In that post I said something so ill-considered, so poorly thought through that, in hindsight, I wish I could take back the sentence that caused all the problems. In the post I regaled you with how happy Carl and Lupe are and how their newfound love is blossoming like fields of tulips in Holland, blah, blah, blah. From this I described how, in my oh-so-lonesome state, I became deeply depressed, went home, threw myself down on the sofa, and ended the paragraph with the unfortunate, two-word sentence: “I weep.”

Those two words resulted in twelve brochures and service offerings from people describing themselves as “relationship coaches”, six offers of marriage – including one from someone named Maynard who lives in Schenectady, New York, and a plea from the wackos at PETA begging me to participate in their “sheep rescue program”. All because I made up that one little two-word sentence. Had I only known.

The Truth is that the blog post, in reality, grew out of one and only one tiny seed of reality: gelato. Everything else is completely fictitious. My dinner and walk with Carl and Lupe? You think they have time for me now that they’ve found each other? Gelato as Viagra for literary dysfunction? Come on, how probable is that? Writer’s block? Me? Jeez, that was over fifteen hundred words on frozen milk for God’s sake, my writer’s block is the only thing preventing these blogs from going over five thousand. It is a gift.

So, it is safe to say, there was no despondency, there was no casting of myself onto the settee, there was no weeping. I am, really I am, very happy that things are still going well for Carl and Lupe. I just wish that they would stop trying to give each other lingual tonsillectomies and come up for air for a few minutes. Maybe then there’d be hope for dinner and a walk.

For all those people who wrote in with offers of support and so much more, thank you. I am touched by your kind thoughts and will try to set your minds at ease. Your freely offered concern should be assuaged with some facts about what really is going on in my life outside of writing. I am happy, this one time, to provide these facts. Just so you don’t worry so much.

First off, I just got another email from the guys at PETA. “Dahlia” is on her way FedEx and I have plenty of room in the freezer. If you don’t tell them I won’t. I love lamb, just not in the way that PETA wanted me to.

Next, for a bit of excitement, I have taken up pickling. My goal is to get a full-sour pickle like the ones in New York delicatessens. My first batch went into the fridge today. This jibes nicely with my interest in sourdough baking and yogurt making. Someday I hope to progress to cheese.

I bought some shoes.

In the garden my lettuce is growing well but the sunny and hot weather that made Seattle famous is making the spinach bolt. I’m not having much luck with the tomatoes. This does not bode well for any future agricultural aspirations I may have.

Finally, I’m reading a book by my favorite humor author: Bill Bryson. It’s titled “At Home, A Short History of Private Life”. In it he traces the history of the way we live by visiting the different rooms of a house. However, since most rooms of a house are not particularly interesting the book lags a bit. From an excitement standpoint this read is in a tie for first place with the pickling experiment.

You can see from all this that there’s really nothing at all to fret about. Of course, there’s more going on than just that but the other things are really just the icing on the cake detailed above. Adding more would just make you all jealous and let you see that my life really is much more exciting than it should be. I hope these brief glimpses of what I’m up to will allay the concerns of those of you who wrote in all filled with worry about my psychological state.

All of which brings us back around to Truth Be Told. Buried in that oft cited tome is a sentence that goes: “The truth, it seems, is vastly overrated from a believability standpoint.” That’s just the way it is in my version of reality. Rather than fill these pages with what is really happening in my life, the Truth, as it were; it is much more productive and believable to make up things about Carl and Lupe, to seriously consider the medicinal properties of gelato, and to postulate that PETA does actually have a sheep rescue program. Had I, over these past few weeks, written about what I was actually doing rather than the fabrications that caused all the problems, well, you just wouldn’t have believed it. And that, for this post anyway, is the Truth.