on repeating stories

A phenomenon has caught my interest: that of repeating stories. I was reminded of it recently while having some after-work beers with a friend, when in order to back up a point he was making he began to recount a story from his past, one I had heard from him more than once before. He told the story in nearly the exact manner he had told it the first and second times, pausing for emphasis at the same spots and drawing the same conclusions he'd drawn during its initial recounting.

This vague example, however, is tame compared to the seemingly endless loop-cycle that some stories seem to enjoy. Following an unscientific and completely subjective analysis of such stories as I hear repeated by friends and family, I have concluded that people use narrative repetition to convince themselves of the validity of certain statements or memories, and that they tell certain stories over and over again in order to blur within their own minds the distinctions between fact and fiction. Some stories, I surmise, are repeated in order to protect the ego from feeling as if it were anything less than stellar; others, I take, are repeated to remember past wrongs and to keep hatred for and discontentment with the wrong-doer alive; and still others, it appears, are repeated in order to travel back in time – if only briefly – to exciting scenes long since passed, to tender loves long since lost, to sudden glory long since faded. Among the persons most likely to repeat a particular tale are middle-aged housewives so obsessed with the details of their own lives that they have forgotten about the great flourishing of danger and excitement that occurs beyond their comfortable walls; I have found it counter-productive, however, to point out to a woman that she is repeating herself, for she will with near certainty become deeply offended and spend the rest of the day sniping and backstabbing.

Upon examining this phenomenon of narrative repetition, I find myself engaging in it fairly regularly, at least when it comes to certain stories told at certain times: upon making a platonic acquaintance, I'll give a prepared summary of my life, the words bubbling out nearly subconsciously; upon meeting a potential mate, I'll present a different set of stories tailored to the young lady's apparent interests in hopes of piquing her fancy; and when discussing politics or issues of similar weight I find myself resorting to a specific cache of stories in order to back myself up, stories I use to convince myself of the validity of my own opinions or to cast doubt upon the opinions held by others. I will often not remember having previously told a story until I am halfway through it and my listeners start showing signs of restlessness (because they have obviously heard me tell it before). It is becoming clear to me that my experiences are so few that they can be summed up using only a handful of worn, old tales, yawn-inducing stories best kept quiet; I am becoming resigned to the fact that my brains so poorly remember the past that they cannot even keep track of the most simple of things, such as the worthlessness of my personal opinions and whether or not I have breached a certain topic with a certain individual. It is strange, and beautiful, sometimes, being alive and so forgetful. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

an open letter to America's founding persons

Dear individuals who founded or influenced the founding of the United States of America: may you have a good day. I write to you across a long stretch of time – nearly two hundred and forty years – with greetings and supplications. Much is being said of late in this fine land you crafted so long ago about your intentions, your motives, and your goals. Friends, woe is befallen us, for we have taken the essence of the nation you designed in the Declaration of Independence and trampled it unceremoniously to dust. As Dr. Franklin warned after the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, we have not been able to hold on to the republic you created; rather, we have allowed the forces of blind and inexorable avarice (which we now refer to rather as corporation-based, consumption-driven capitalism) to all but ruin the seemingly boundless promise of your intended nation. No longer does government exist to serve the People – now its punishes with fines and imprisonment those of us who drink deeply of the Blessings of Liberty and who pursue our Happiness as we see best fit without infringing upon the Life, Liberty, or Property of any other person or persons; now it exists not to foster the free mind, the free life, or the free will but to punish the People for not living according to the rules it proclaims will bring the most benefit to the most people, rules, however, which are designed by and written for the benefit of a few hundred thousand of the richest citizens (and their respective corporate bodies) who enjoy privileged access to policy-makers due to their vast wealth, lack of humility, and insufficient focus on the Shared and Common Causes (making all people, equally, Safe and Happy) which should bind us, as countrymen, to one another, indelibly. Justice, friends, has been banished behind such dark and oppressive curtains as hang in our houses of deliberation; her blindfold has been removed in order to combat a poorly defined danger known as terrorism; and her sword now strikes down such persons – both native and foreign-born – as have not even been given a decent or fair trial by a jury of their peers. As mentioned previously, laws exist that promote neither the general Welfare nor that insure the domestic Tranquility but that subjugate the People to the whims of heavily-armed, fear-obsessed, oppression-minded police forces and that divert the vast wealth generated by the collective labor of this nation's citizens into the pockets of those few of us who have the best political connections and the broadest corporate reach. The noble cause of a more perfect Union has been replaced by the nation-wide homogenization of goods and services that has eroded the independent and self-respecting nature of the People, replacing it instead with a sheep-like mentality under which we slave primarily to fuel personal over-consumption of foodstuffs, electricity, and images that are piped at great expense into our homes where they move about on magical picture-boxes hanging from the walls.

Such is our suffering, and more. We move about not under our own power but atop and within auto-mobile metal boxes that are powered by the burning of a liquid pitch, an inflammable black goo that is pumped from the ground in distant places by hirsute, turbaned foreigners who use the profit from the sale of this oil to fund terrorist groups that in turn murder the People and maim our friends. Rather than raising and storing our own crops, we rely on foods that throughout their lives are sprayed regularly with an unknowable mixture of dangerous and volatile chemicals before they are moved nearly to our doorsteps via larger self-propelled metal boxes that travel upon thousands of miles of rock-and-liquid-pitch-paved roads; rather than raise our own livestock, we rely on meats that throughout their lives are injected regularly with an unknowable mixture of powerful medicines and growth-promoting chemicals before they are moved nearly to our doorsteps upon the aforementioned roads. And, due to this lack of autonomous locomotion and this over-abundance of foodstuffs, we have become lazy and fat, suffering therefore from fatness- and laziness-related diseases and dying of them by the hundreds of thousands.

Oh, dear brothers and sisters, you who stamped this nation out of the dust, who risked Life, Fortune, and Honor in order to create a nation dedicated to the Safety and Happiness of a free and independent People, please accept our apologies for destroying all that which you risked to create, and for desecrating and neglecting all that which you worked so hand to bring about. We are weak, we are spineless, and we hardly deserve even the last, dying remnants of that which you so diligently created. Please, dearest fore-fathers and fore-mothers, please forgive us, for we knew the dangers of the path we have stumbled down, choosing it however because it offered us the least resistance. America delenda est.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit