The Honest Lies of Jon.

Truth is a fickle thing. Honesty is yet another. “Is there a difference between honesty and the truth?” Maybe that's irrelevant. In any case, today I'd like to talk about a friend of mine. One who i question more and more every day.

We'll (I'll) call this certain fellow Jon for the sake of anonymity (as well as for easy typing). Jon has been my good friend for the past 3-4 years. I think he's been there ever since i entered high school. From the beginning up to this day, I feel that i have lost a certain (read: ginormous) level of respect of Jon. That said, I would like you to know that i am a quite open-minded fellow. Not gullible (maybe borderline), but i do have a fine line of "enough" that i draw at a certain point. I am trusting of words and opinions, but i also do let trivial, far-fetched stories slide for the sake of flowing, enjoyable conversation (i.e. stories about utter 1337 pwnage in CS, SC, Halo, etc.). Jon, however, is something of a demon-god juggernaut when it comes to social story telling for the sake of telling stories to impress friends for about 5 seconds. Jon takes it to a new level. His stories exemplify everything you could ever use the prefix "over-" for. Examples: overkill, overblown, overstated, overwrought, overwhelming, overutterbullshitnessosity, overetc.

Upon further recollection, I wont tell Jon's stories. I'll save that for a later post after we've gone to different colleges. I'll just talk about how his stories have changed my perception of Jon.

Assuming that you've now heard Jon's amazingly outrageous stories of the departed...whoops..did i let that slip? Oop. Lookit that. Teaser. hooray. hot. moving on. I don't know if Jon's stories are tests of my loyalty or my brotherly love for this fellow. If they are, he's sick. The worst part is, he's even told some gal friends before too and made them deathly worried about Jon. They later doubted Jon's truthfulness and decided to ignore him on future stories. The gals are still his friends to this day, however, Jon doesn't pull anymore of his bullshit in fear of thinking minds turning on him and unleashing all hell upon his credibility as a friend. Thus, he has resorted to his old faithful buddy, me. The idiot. I still listen to Jon's stuff. I play along. It's tough, yes. But at what cost? What could i possibly gain by confronting him with his ill-founded tales. More than once have i held back the urge to let loose a surge of questions that could easily pwn that mofo with pure, unfiltered, holy logic. [side note: Jon is a terrible story teller. His tales have many holes. Many things that can be contested but impossible to verify. So in short, checkmate. Nothing we can do about his bullshit except smell it like it was meant to be.] I don't want to hurt him. I seem like one of his closest friends ironically. He seems like a pretty sensitive guy and to go all out and just slam him for all his lies after all these years would probably simply crush the man. Hanging out with him is getting stale. His jokes aren't that funny. The inside comments he makes are hard to discern and detect. Usually he just yells out a random sound or some random word (i.e. "PURPLE!!!!!") and then laughs manically about it afterwards, expecting me or another friend of his to 30961980040512% understand him and laugh accordingly. Usually i give a monosyllabic dry laugh and turn away. I think that's the best reaction for the both of us these days.

It's been a while since he's enlightened me on the ongoings of his epic odyssey in the dark, evil world of his even though he acts and seems like one of us [nerd-ish]. But recently, he dropped another omfg-not-this-crap-again bomb that sounds no different than his words of the past year. I thought he got over it. I thought he understood that maybe people really don't care anymore. I thought that maybe he decided that it's not funny to screw with people's compassion for him and the time and heart people put into listening to his stories. But no, nothing's changed this year even. His resilience is astounding. His determination confounding. His evaluation of my mental capacity to logically reason his stories, mistaken. Same old Jon. Same Jon. Jon.

In short, I've given up. High school is almost over now, might as well keep to it for just a little bit longer. Then the day after graduation, just ask him front and center, "Hey, remember all that stuff you told me during high school about _______________________________________________________ ? Tell me the truth right here and right now. Was/Is it all real? Be honest now. Right now. Only now." But until that day comes, I'll just imagine walking away from the conversation in mid-sentence. Wasn't ever much of a conversation anyway.

I hope Jon never goes into acting. He's terrible.

Maybe I should go into acting....after appearing all surprised and shocked at repetitious, hackneyed, contrived stories for over 3 years, I must admit that I'm pretty darn good at it. Something to think about while I'm in college.