The Story of Fickle Fictitious Facts

We live in fictitious times indeed, my friends.

The story is everywhere right now.  Larger than life characters with fascinating backstories and mainstream melodrama.  Big names for big personalities—TRUMP, COUMO, FAUCI.  Constant suspense, harrowing cliffhangers, high stakes.  It is a story for the ages.  Playing now on screens everywhere.

Be not mistaken—this is not a biography of 2020.  This isn’t a true story.   The historical record of the last two months will not be found in the nonfiction section.  Instead of revisionist history, this is the revisionist now.  A fictionalized take set in present day.  I keep looking for a footnote to denote sources, but we are living a story.  Stories don’t have research.  They don’t have sources.  No footnotes.  We are getting information, but do not mistake fiction for facts.  Information is simply a collection of words absent source or circumstance or conformation.

Information without context is not a fact—it is an agenda.  

A story.  A script.  The players recite their lines in gravitas worthy Tom Stoppard or Arthur Miller—endless Shakespearean soliloquies over Twitter—fatality count in place of page numbers to pass the unfolding drama.  There’s danger, death, and drama.  We’re living in a science fiction with questionable science.  

Question everything.  Always.  Because you never know where the answers are coming from...

            

The Story of Now

So there are moments in life when I’ve had to pause and look around to see if I’m living in a movie.  Check the mirror and see if it’s Eddie Newton being played by Bruce Willis or John Malkovich.  Once, someone broke into our house and the next thing I knew I was prowling around with a steak knife, prodding in closets and under beds like Liam Neeson.  But it wasn’t a movie.  Or the phone call that came when I was least expecting with news that changed everything forever.  Not a movie.  September the Eleventh.  Not a movie.

I know now how those other stories ended.  But what about when you’re in the middle of the situation, and you pause and look around and wonder if someone had a script for this?  It just seems made up.  Who are these other characters in this tale?  A lot of them aren’t acting like they used to.  This is Wonderland, where fiction and facts are muddled and mimsy.  Brave heroes are scared - good guys are wearing masks - left has become right and right becomes left.  We’re in the middle of the story, or the middle of the beginning, or at least middler from the start than the finish.  What I don’t know is where the story is leading and how it is going to end and what it all means for our main characters.  

We’re through the looking glass, folks.  Things might go from worse to worser.  Folks aren’t happy on either side of the aisle  - in fact, we’re all mad here.

             

The Story of Story

I am currently obsessed by the idea of “story”.  Not the novels of Twain (in awe, not obsessed) or the latest Tom King run on Batman (impressed, but not obsessed) or the timelessness of Shakespeare (maybe a little obsessed).  It is the idea wherein each of us creates our own story of us - an autobiography of ourself that is written by a unique author and a biased researcher.  Each of those stories throughout history is entirely unique, not one the same as another.  We write our own chapters, every perspective unique to the individual protagonist, with a climax that always finishes with THE END.  History is rewritten to fit the narrative that we want and the chapters are arranged to make us each the hero of our own tale.  Facts are obscured and characters rewritten to revolve around a central theme of self.  Each tome is tailored specifically to the teller.  What a grand library - what a fascinating tapestry of tales.  In every narrative, there may be adventure, drama, romance, misery and mystery, tragedy and comedy.  And always, ever, a story that is worth being told.
               But before THE END
                               ...before the EVER AFTER
                                                         ...there is a ONCE UPON A TIME...