The line between lying and embellishing is jumbledlkafdhgk

A whiskey festival in town. A rare thing here, I hope it happens more often.

Every week or so I take a bit of time to explore.

I like finding the obscure, the weird, the funny, and—on days like this—those who have perfected what I aspire to do.

It’s always neat to find out how successful people got their starts. In the former realm of mine—the business world—it’s not that hard.

The story is almost always the same.

Thanks to the ‘art’ of PR firms, I’m sure.

Famous CEO #1 had incredibly humble beginnings, his father only owned an emerald mine (not diamonds) and couldn’t afford to send him to the top-ranked school in the world, so he went to the terrible 2nd best. See how many bootstraps he pulled up? Turn over your immortal soul and pray to him now!

I’m sure you know the usual story. They’re almost always obfuscating the truth, which is of course, what PR firms are trained to do. It’s just kind of hilarious how most of society (including myself) tends to forget these aren’t genuine tales, but pseudo stories based on some reality and some combination of, well, lying.

It sure makes for a good memoir though.

This Week’s Discovery

In my little exploration this week, I came across some guy I haven’t heard of named Mike Daisey. I profess I haven’t yet taken the time to watch his full work, but I did get sucked into a couple gossipy articles about his career.

He’s apparently a member of the obscure profession called a ‘monologist.’

A) I didn’t really know what that meant. Not sure I still do.

B) I have no idea how he can afford to live.

But the idea of that, to craft to perfection what is essentially the combination between a long-form essay, humor, and visual performance, sounded pretty awesome.

Not something I aspire to do, but awesome nonetheless.

The reason I’m mentioning him today?

Turns out, he was a bit of a naughty monologist.

From the sounds of it, one of his many monologues became viral enough to warrant the extremely popular This American Life podcast to host him for a version of his masterpiece.

It was about China—Shocker that I was interested in it, eh?—and more specifically, about how he had gone to and pseudo-investigated the working conditions at an Apple manufacturer.

I’m sure you can guess the rest of how that story went. China isn’t exactly known for its human rights, if that’s even a phrase there. Manufacturing apples is much harder than Adam made it out to be.

But Daisey—what a name—apparently embellished the sh*t out of a lot of his story.

No one gave a crap until his episode of This American Life came out, and apparently, that sparked the internet warrior sleuths to come out in droves and investigate the merits of all his claims.

Turns out, many of them were completely made up. His accusers said they were outright lies. He said they were just embellishments to make his story more attractive.

I didn’t read enough to ‘investigate’ the story myself—because it doesn’t matter to me.

He ended up issuing a formal apology while still maintaining his stance, and This American Life reclassified his work outside of the nonfiction it was situated under before. I doubt he’ll be a guest there again anytime soon.

But that brings me to the crux of this thought.

Pocket Full of Hazy

Daisey Chain up there mixes in a lot of humor throughout his stories about traveling abroad.

Sound familiar?

He also heavily embellishes aspects of his story to make it more fun to hear and experience.

Sound familiar?

He also became pretty popular among a subset of people over the years after doing it for several decades.

Sound fam…haha no. My recent essays are getting like 100 views on Medium. Some day! Some day....I too look forward to being publically vilified for trying to make people laugh.

At the end of the day though, I think he’s right. And his detractors are right, too.

Because they’re talking about the exact same thing, just using different words with different weightings and different emotions to describe the action.

Calling it a lie implies an insidious attempt. Calling it an embellishment is admitting it’s a lie but for an attempt to entertain.

Same sh*t, different viewpoint.

Box Me Up

For me, it seems the problem arises with classification.

If you jump onto Amazon you’ll find over 10,000 categories for books. That’s insane.

But good, if you’re a weird writer like me who smashes together as many mini-niches as possible because specialization leads to the thrilling reads we find in academic papers.

It would be irresponsible of me to purport to estimate your absentee interest in my documented literature if one such as me were to write in this formal manner.

Imagine me trying to make a go of this while writing only in a boring ass style like that? I’d have better luck mass-selling the production method behind delicious peanut butter tuna sandwiches.

Or maybe I’m onto something there…

So, embellish I do. But I don’t always do it. And I never tell people which parts of a story are true and untrue.

Some stories, as hard as it is to believe, are completely true. Others are more based on real people, events, and qualities extracted out to a story that’s—hopefully—an enjoyable read.

But I never claim they’re nonfiction, outside of the occasional tag on Medium if it is, in fact, completely based on truth.

I prefer leaving a little bit of the unknown. The mystery. The guessing. The enjoyment.

Did JJ actually randomly pick up a human skull in a cave in the Philippines while visiting his expat cousin’s insanely weird pig farm in the middle of nowhere?

Do I actually eat peanut butter tuna sandwiches every day?

Am I actually a lizard person pretending to be human?

Who f*cking knows.

And that’s exactly how I’ll be keeping it.

Perhaps I’ll never be asked to guest host a This American Life episode because they only dangle in 100% nonfiction.

But that’s okay.

Because my writing, my stories, my enjoyment, and hopefully yours is a blend of thoughts and experiences and humorous embellishment culminating from a life lived weird.

And if I’m weird, then to me, it would be weird to write 100% factually about my life.

Because it wouldn’t be enjoyable to me. And if it’s not enjoyable to me, then how can I expect a stranger plopped somewhere around the world to enjoy it too.

I’m here to entertain with my personal stories. I have my other essay niches for when the truth needs to be told.

So, if you followed along this far, thank you reader, for enjoying something that’s not quite nonfiction and not quite fiction. It’s somewhere in the middle. One day I’ll find out just where exactly that sweet spot actually is.

But I know it is, in fact, there, because as they say:

“The truth is always in the middle,” after all.

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PS. Does anybody know what a category along the lines of ‘Based on a true story,’ is? Asking for a friend.

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This fictiony nonfiction message has been brought to you by J.J. Pryor.

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