Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Unauthorized Autobiography: Chapter 1

Everything I’m going to tell you is the truth. Except for what I just said.

Don’t let that put you off, though. People read lies every day. They build their lives around them, act on them, make a living with them, carry them to the grave. I like to carry mine in my back pocket, next to the credit card (a lie about how much I’m worth) and the birth certificate (a lie about my true identity).

The credit card is platinum. It has a limit of $100,000. I bought it for fifty bucks from Nickie at the Hammer Hotel in Arnprior. (It wasn’t really Arnprior. I just like the sound of it.)

The card is worthless now, anyway. I barely managed to escape from Eaton’s Yorkdale when I tried to buy a leather sofa with it and sent alarm bells blasting through the telephone wires all the way from Downtown Data Central because they finally figured out that Mustafa McKeown, the name on the card, was made up and had been ringing up bogus bills all over Ontario.

I keep the card anyway, when my keepers let me. I fondle it now and then, like a talisman, a memory of better, wilder days. I used it once to break into my hell-hole apartment when I had locked myself out. I might use it one day to break out of this hell-hole, the All-Pervading, Infinitely-Intrusive, Mind-Sucking Yoni School for Wayward Poets.

My birth certificate reads:

Name: Keiler, Laurence Lancaster (Larry to you, Lanc to my dear departed dad.)

Date of Birth: August 07, 1954

Place of Birth: Berlin, Ontario

Date of Registration: August 27, 1954

All true, as far as it goes, but not nearly as complete as it seems. Partial truths are almost as bad as lies. Politicians and priests through the ages have misled their trusting flocks with incomplete but authoritative solutions to the problems of the world ... and the otherworld.