“On Lying”

            Lying is a messy subject. When lies are told rather than just offering up the truth, feelings are hurt and lives are more complicated than they were. Sometimes lies can be good. Depending on the situation and the circumstances, a lie can help protect the feelings of a friend or loved one. I have seen my parents, grandparents; friends, siblings and strangers etc., all tell lies at one point in their lives if not more. In my experience, lies just catch up with you and can really destroy you. Lies come in a series of stages. Lies are like cancer; they spread, taking over your entire life until there is nothing left except for disgust and hatred.

            The first stage of a lie is in effect before the lie even becomes a reality. If someone is going to tell a lie, he or she needs to really think about what they are going to say. In T.C. Boyle’s short story, “The Lie” Lonnie is this compulsive liar. He is tired of his mundane and monotonously boring life. He just wants some time off. Lonnie has decided that he is going to get his “sick day”. He allows stage two to take effect: telling the lie. His problem is that he tells these extremely permanent lies. “‘It’s the baby…she’s sick. Very sick. With a fever and all that. We don’t know what’s wrong with her…I’m at the hospital now.”’ (Boyle 61). The problem with his “white lie” was that he then turned it into: the baby has Leukemia and then tells his boss that his baby died. That took it to the extreme just so he could get a few days’ rest, which never actually were restful. That’s just disgusting. Someone using their child and feigning illness or death with them is just horrible. It’s extremely bad karma and just immoral. I am not saying that real parents don’t do it. My own father works us into the lies he tells my mother or his co-workers about why he could not do something or be somewhere. I hate when he does it. It makes me feel un-important or as if being a father is such a burden; almost as if we don’t really matter to him. He lies so easily to my mother, that I think it is a disease. Lying eats away at you until all you know how to do is to lie. Lonnie tries lying to himself at one point. “I told myself I was hungry, that was all, but when I wandered into the food court and saw what they had arrayed there…but I ordered a Captain-and-Coke, just for the smell of it” (Boyle 63). I think that lying to yourself to try and make it through a day, rather than face the facts of life, is just sad. For some people it becomes their natural instinct.