The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: truth

  • The Night of Many Names

    I’m not going to tell you a lot of things. The things I need to tell you, I will, but the rest you will have to trust in or disbelieve the entire thing. I don’t really care.

    Which is the first lie.

    I do care. I’m trying to tell you something that’s important. If I fail to convince you of the meat of this story, then I will have to try again. That will be dangerous. But someone needs to know.

    And that is the second truth I’ve revealed to you.

    Proceed with caution but proceed. It’s important.

    This is about a single night in the calendar that you’ve never heard of but which has as many names as cultures that are aware of it. It’s the Night of Many Names, the night when bad things happen to good people because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s unfortunate, but necessary. The herd must be culled. (more…)

  • Care Enough Not to Care

    For the first couple years I was in college, I spent the summers working at my hometown newspaper. It was a small weekly publication, and it introduced me to deadlines, editing, and how much I didn’t know about writing.

    It was a great experience, and I seriously considered not going back to college after that first summer. I was addicted to being in the know, even if my sphere of knowledge was largely limited to the county around me. I also loved feeling like the words I wrote mattered to someone, and I held the belief that I was part of some larger fraternity of journalists, with whom I shared a code of ethics and a responsibility to the community I represented.

    I was nothing if not an idealist.

    During that first summer, I remember my mom asking me what I’d do if I had to report on something that involved a member of our family. Her question went something like this: If it was bad, you wouldn’t write about it would you? I think she was hoping for a different answer than the one I gave.

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  • Truth Hurts, but It’s Worth It

    Stories like this are tricky. Ultimately, they’re subjective. All I can do is lay out the events as I see them, and you have to understand that I’m giving you a single point of view. This is my own admittedly biased experience, and others in this tale could take exception to my interpretation. Be that as it may, this is the event that I feel has done the most to shape me into the writer I am today.

    Growing up, my brothers and I hit the daily double of childhood. We were both rural and poor, and from an early age we were taught to distrust authority. Most of our conversations with non-related adults consisted of the following phrases: “I don’t know,” and “they’re not here right now.” The tenants of our family were simple and observed like dogma: support it, defend it, and keep everything in house.

    If you weren’t blood, our affairs were none of your damned business, and marrying in didn’t necessarily afford you with a right to know.

    As a child, this sort of fierce loyalty appealed to me, and I saw something noble and good in its application. My brothers and I belonged to something greater than ourselves, and we thought it was something worth defending. I no longer feel that way.

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