Sayin' Don't Make It So

 There's an old R & B song I love by the above title. I can only find a recent remake by Duke Robillard. The version I love was recorded back in the 1940s, and was on a blues compendium CD I used to have. One of the early lines in the song always makes me laugh "I'd believe you better baby if your wig wasn't on so tight". It's a song that speaks of folks that make ridiculous lying claims and the singer knows better.

 

Back in the mid aughts when I worked at a large clinic across the parking lot from a hospital we got to see a lot of crazy examples of this. One regular patient showed up staggering and babbling, either having some sort of seizures or a stroke. We were so worried that one of the doctors ordered him loaded in the clinic wheelchair and he was pushed across the parking lot to the emergency room and admitted for suspected stroke. His problem? He was high on meth, and starting to have seizures. To this day he swears he didn't take drugs. Sure, pal. Drug panels do not lie.

I sat at my desk and dealt with the flood of early narcotics refill requests with a suspicious eye. I called it "The dog ate my oxycontin" at one point I had a chart with the most creative excuses ever used. I begin to understand why Dr. House used to say that all patients lied.

But the biggest whoppers I heard came on the day that one of our regular patients showed up with a large sized can of Aqua Net hairspray jammed up his where the sun doesn't shine. His excuse? He slipped in the shower and landed on the can. It slipped up his ass, cap and all. Yeah, like any of us bought that excuse. Everyone at the clinic was muffling giggles and whispering about the guy with the can of hairspray up his ass. Eventually he was transferred to the friendly hospital across the parking lot, sedated, butt dilated, and the can delivered.

What all of these scenarios there had in common is that there people involved were clearly lying their biscuits off, even if it was obvious to all of us it was a lie. The only one that fooled us initially was the high on meth guy. The doctors were freaking out thinking he was stroking out. 

It's hard to have compassion on folks that routinely lie to you. Why people lie when it's so easily found out I just don't know why. Lately I am seeing a capacious amount of lying on YouTube by that certain creator I have taken to calling Without a Moral Compass. She's seemed gone off the deep end with the falsehoods.

I've had a few very bad days here as the Hurricane Iota rolled by through Nicaragua. Lately I have noticed that the barometric pressure pre-torm sets off the worst of my mast cell. I will not bore you with all the repetitive symptoms and whining. Just say I have been hurting. Crawling between the bed and the desk and back again.

I've also been badly shaken by a few suicides of friends, and hearing of even more divorces and splits happening in my various friends groups and social circles. It's a deeply distressing and stressful time, this horrible uncertainty. As of midnight tonight my U.S. drivers license is invalid here. A party I turned down attending last month has turned out to be a super spreader event here, with over half the party goers diagnosed with Covid. I hate uncertainty and this is a time when the very ground beneath our feet feels so unstable. 

Jim's been preoccupied with his new trainer, and the new gardener. I've been less than thrilled with his new hires, but that's not the point here. No lying going on there at least.

Miss Without a Moral Compass has been scheming to get an insiders view of the show "Welcome to Plathville" since she bumped heads with one of the cast members, Olivia Plath. Last night she started tweeting out that she had a big interview lined up for tonight with Lydia Grace, Olivia's sister, dumping the dirt, a planned bashathon gossip fest.

I reached out to Olivia on a Facebook group we're both in about this. Others did too. Olivia talked to Without a Moral Compass and presto chango the interview was cancelled. But I'm still afraid for Olivia. WaMC stated she'll be talking about her conversation with Olivia and the ethics of Olivia quashing WaMC's first amendment rights tonight. I'm sick to my stomach thinking about this and the likely piles of falsehoods that will be flogged about as the truth. In my humble opinion. Allegedly. Rumored of course.

I am still not sure why TLC's attorneys connected to the show haven't served her with a cease and desist.

This is not "Journalism" folks, no matter how many times she shouts it. I've written for a newspaper, slogged along writing at a print magazine in the early 1980s, and contributed to a veritable flood of online paid content. None of it looks anything like this. Patheos liked us to style ourselves as opinion columnists, not bloggers or anything as grand as a journalist.  Sayin' don't make it so.

ETA: One piece of good news. They did just extend our drivers licenses out until March with our visas. Whew!