One Hundred Lies, Vol.1

The year was 2009. James Ernest and Brian Murphy published a thrice-weekly web comic called Brian and John. The comic is sadly offline today, though you can still buy the first collection here.

Inspired by a random list of “getting-to-know-you” questions from the Internet, James started writing a biweekly feature called “The Year of 100 Lies,” which lasted for 40 entries. Even the title of the series was a lie, as James never expected to reach 100. The first block of five of these lies are collected below.

They all started out something like this:

BRIAN: John, have you ever started your own blog?

JOHN: No, but I will tell you a lie about it.

Blogging is for fools and simpletons. I prefer to keep a “Web Journal,” or as it is more commonly known, a Bjorn. Three primary characteristics distinguish a blog from a Bjorn.

First, while a blog typically focuses on its author, a Bjorn is usually about someone else. For example, I once maintained an eighteen-month Bjorn detailing Abraham Lincoln’s youth in Perry County Indiana, during which time he built several flying machines and discovered a process for making artificial salmon eggs.

Second, while blogs are typically mundane regurgitations of daily life, Bjorns are largely delightful and apocryphal. For example, readers of a blog might learn each day what the author was having for breakfast, or whether he enjoyed the most recent episode of “Lost.” Conversely, readers of my Bjorn entry on the Calvin Adams Company might be surprised to learn that a “coffee mill” is a device for grinding beans and not, as I described it, a time portal with the power to link us to past and future civilizations.

Finally, while blogs are typically composed of letters and spaces, Bjorns are made almost entirely of wheat. Let this stand as an example proving that I am completely unafraid to tell the most bald-faced of lies. Really, as far as I can tell, there is no third difference.

In the interest of entertaining my friend Brian, I have begun this Bjorn entitled “The Year of 100 lies,” in which I shall attempt to answer one hundred of his inane questions in the most delightful and apocryphal way possible. Because Brian’s questions will inevitably relate to me, I will usually answer in my own voice, making this a somewhat atypical “semi auto-apocryphal” Bjorn. If it makes you more comfortable, you are welcome to imagine that these answers have in fact been written by someone else.

BRIAN: John, have you ever slept under the stars?

JOHN: No, but I will tell you a lie about it.

Once I was a dashing young pirate, sailing the mighty waters of the Caribbean. Though I frequently bunked below decks, I had more than one occasion to sleep under the stars.

The modern romantic obsession with pirates is wholly incorrect. Pirates today are depicted as swaggering, bearded scoundrels who sailed the seven seas plundering merchant vessels and living miserable, brief lives on the run. While this makes for great storytelling, it is nothing like the truth.

Pirates were in fact attractive, well-spoken, and highly educated individuals who patrolled the Caribbean for sharks, sea monsters, and mermaids on behalf of various military and merchant vessels. Pirate ships kept freewheeling drunkards like the Spanish fleet from running aground on sand bars, coral reefs, and the like. And they were handsomely rewarded for their efforts.

However, in an attempt to repaint themselves as the mightiest seamen of the 17th century, the Dutch navy, which at the time consisted of about ten vessels with no more than fifty guns between them, began spreading rumors of an evil pirate, Old Jim Barnacle, who sailed from the Dutch port at St. Eustatius in the summer of 1662. In fact, the island of St. Eustatius was considered worthless by all concerned, but rumors of Jim Barnacle’s hideout caused the English and Dutch to fight constantly over this tiny scrap of land, with each claiming sovereignty over the island no fewer than sixty times in the space of ten years. This fabrication, along with the introduction of an extremely potent brand of Jamaican rum, were to be the undoing of the mighty Pirate fleet.

It was not long until tales like that of Jim Barnacle became commonplace, and decent pirates found themselves all but unable to find paying work. A golden era ended, and pirates were scattered to the four winds, to become merchant seamen, accountants, and exotic dancers. Yet I will never forget the feeling of freedom and community that comes from sleeping under the stars with a crew of the finest navigators and comrades ever to sail the Spanish Main.

BRIAN: John, have you ever played in a band?

JOHN: No, but I will tell you a lie about it.

In the Old West, folks called me Dirty Bucktooth, on account of my dirty buck teeth. I had a streak of murderin’ and gamblin’ that suited them dirty towns, and I ain’t never had no ear for music. But one day, a day I’ll never forget, I had the chance to play in a band.

I was just gettin’ out of the two-room jail in San Fidel, on account of havin’ stabbed a feller who was a-reachin’ for his gun. When up the main street comes the Butterfield stage just a hoppin’ and a bouncin’ on account of there’s a band inside, what called itself The Grounders.

Now I ain’t never played in no band, and I don’t reckon I’d ever do so again, except come to find out it was this feller I stabbed what played the washboard for this particular troupe, and he wasn’t gonna play with them tonight on account of him bein’ dead. And I figured it’s the least I can do, seein’ as I put the man to rest, to help fill in for the dead man until they can find them someone permnent like.

So up on the stage at the Old Bottle I goes with the three survivin’ Grounders, and danged if people didn’t come from miles around to stomp and shimmy and dance that night away. A course them Grounders wasn’t a-havin’ me to their after-party, on account of I keeled their washboard scratcher, but I’m sure I’d a had me quite a time chattin’ with them fillies that kept a paradin’ through that hotel room til the break of dawn.

Naw, I don’t spect I’ll be playin’ in another band anytime soon, but I figger it’s thrill enough just to say I done it once, the night The Grounders come to town.

BRIAN: Have you ever visited Hawaii?

JOHN: No, but I will tell you a lie about it.

It may come as a shock in this day and age to learn that Hawaii is actually a myth. The island of Hawaii was originally an invention of the Roosevelt-Garner administration. Hawaii is not commonly known to cultures outside the United States and is not featured on maps produced and sold outside of North America.

Aerial images of the island of Hawaii are typically from the Solomon Islands of Santa Isabel, Choiseul, and Vella Lavella, though a few may have also been captured on the secret mid-Atlantic islands of Greco and Santa Helena. Footage of volcanic activity on Hawaii is typically shot in the Chilean volcanoes of Antuco and Cerro Azul.

Since 1941, the demand for tourism to the Hawaiian Islands has posed an interesting challenge to American travel agents, who know by and large that Hawaii is not real. Tourists are typically delivered to miscellaneous Polynesian destinations, or the Chilean mainland, where alert staffers are encouraged to welcome them to Hawaii based on subtle markers such as flower leis and drinks with paper umbrellas.

The lie of Hawaii is large but strangely easy to maintain, because so many people are willing to believe that they have visited, or even grown up in, Hawaii. The idea of a tropical paradise free of hustle and bustle and protected under the dominion of the United States is such a pleasant fiction that no one works very hard to unravel it.

It goes without saying that I have never been there.

BRIAN: Have you ever watched a meteor shower?

JOHN: No, but I will tell you a lie about it.

In the merchant cycle of 3112 I was a freighter captain traversing the zone between Case Delta Seven and Port French. This was just after the Deodad wars, and the entire Flage Sector was slowly overcoming their suspicion and learning to live together in a safer, less populated world.

I had no way of knowing that my first mate Huf, a disgruntled spoondok from Dreft, had been coerced by The Enemy to booby-trap my launch console. Huf was a monstrous creature, nearly ten feet tall, with hundreds of spindly prehensile appendages. But his brain was no bigger than a walnut, and his pathetic booby trap failed to explode during more than a hundred coupling maneuvers, surviving the war by more than nine cycles.

I think Huf was sure that sabotaging my vessel would lead to his advancement, or perhaps to the betterment of mankind. There’s no telling what lies The Enemy had told him, as anyone was capable of convincing him of the most ridiculous things with next to no effort. Huf spent one entire ghost cycle humming quietly to himself because I had told him it might make him taller. The cycle before that, I had convinced him that there was no such thing as cheese. Imagine his embarrassment at parties.

Still, inevitably, the vegemite charge that Huf had placed beneath the corrugated bench plate housing my G450 draft attenuators eventually exploded during a refueling at Froth. The Enemy had long since won the war, and Huf had doubtless forgotten all about his trap, since both he and I were standing over the console at the time.

Huf and I were blown instantly into the airless void, at which moment the expression on Huf’s face made the details of his nefarious arrangement clear to me. Before we expired from asphyxia, and before the laser drones of Froth burned our corpses into harmless space dust, we had the opportunity to witness a lovely meteor shower.

The Year of 100 Lies continues for seven more episodes. Stay tuned!

Writing Prompts Vol. A

The Devil’s Walk