lying sack of dogs

I lied to a cop a few days ago. I looked him smack-dab in the eye and bore false witness unto his personage, telling him that I played guitar. I do not. Why did I do this? Why did I risk hell and the indignity of a strip search? The immediate reason, I guess, is it was easier than going through a broker to get my friend’s music gear across the Canadian border, and I thought I could get away with it. I almost didn’t.

I looked in that Indo-Canadian guard’s eyes and I could see it – just for a moment. He knew I was lying and he was weighing it out, thinking, “this little rat-nut is trying to shyster me. It has been a bit of a lazy one… I should exercise my limitless border-guard powers and have his car stripped to the axles, his dog beaten, and electrodes attached to places on his body he will not enjoy until he admits to every walk he has every jayed and every cop he’s ever cursed. I should break this little fudrucker”.

Then, as quickly as it was there, the look was gone. “All right” he said, handing me my passport with a look of disdain worthy of the Maharaja himself. “You may go”. And go I did, feeling like dirt. Not good, clean, organic, forest-floor loam, mind you, but a chemical-laden, fetid muck oozing with maggots on the floor below a row of factory-farmed, hormonally-charged boiler hens.

This little indiscretion (or felony, if you will) is yet another reminder of a truth that these days smacks me upside of the head more than I enjoy admitting – that I’m not as swell a fellow as I have convinced myself and my mum that I am. I think this is a good thing. I think I have spent too long self-obsessing, strutting around like a peacock (pardon my french) saying, “don’t I just blow your mind? Aren’t my feathers just brilliant?”

When I am put through the testing fire and have come out as a pile of ash and some teeth, I have to admit that I am a pretentious poppenjay, and that perhaps my primary reason for being so “good” all the time is that I am running pell-mell from a fear of reprisal. It could very well be that any of the right actions I have taken have been not out of a genuine love for what is True, but rather out of a terror that is a diminution of the Real me that ought to be.

Maybe lying to a cop will prove to have been the lynch-pin that broke me out of petty posturing and got me to accept my mediocrity and really start Living. Maybe I should break more laws, so it gets harder to think of myself as OK. Probably not, but I do not want to end up chalking up my reaction to my failings as the pathos-addiction of my youth, a desire to dig up drama out of every insignificant event.

Better a penitent fool in sackcloth than a strutting fool in silk.