The Shark That Never Bit Me: The Authority in Fiction and the Fiction in Authority (Patreon)

Greetings, kittens. We are on month six of time ditching that whole Ligotti pastische flat circle gig and becoming a polka-dotted balloon filled with doom wasps and existential anxiety tossed from fool to fool on a beach of nightmare timelines.

Also, fall is here! Pumpkins! Apples! Foggy mornings! Crunchy leaves! The death of hope!

HA HA HA IT IS TO JOKE. WE HAVE GOOD TIMES, DON’T WE?

Nah, everything is still stupid and desperate and unjust and burning 24/7 but now I guess it’s pumpkin-flavored so woo-hoo sweater weather.

ANYWAY.

I’m going to get right into it because smooth segueways are for the Before Times when we had luxuries like flour and going outside and planning for the future. 

I had a series of tweets about lies and shark bites and summer camp go viral a couple of weeks ago. Now, this does happen from time to time. I’m not trying to brag or do the very popular white lady hot yoga move called Blowing Sunshine Up One’s Own Ass. Stay active on any social media service, talk shit about everything, have even the mildest way with words, and eventually something hits. It is impossible to predict what that will be—my most popular tweets to date are a read of Jared Kushner’s stupid face, a very dumb joke about a work thing not being my fault, some crap about Baby Shark, and yelling at Bill Maher where he will never, ever hear it. You just yell garbage into the void and sometimes it says ooh nice garbage like and subscribe I’m gonna share this with all my void-friends.

But I don’t usually end up writing a whole essay about the specific garbage the void enjoyed especially this month. 

The thing is, I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It fascinates me that these tweets in particular spread so far and fast, that they were shared by such very famous and very unrelated people, that these, which I tossed off two glasses of wine past midnight while ignoring Real Housewives out of the corner of one eye, and not the tweets I construct painstakingly with care for every word and every delicate sentiment, that dragged in 6000 new followers in 48 hours and ended up causing actual people in actual authority to contact me to talk about these issues as though I’m an expert. 

What the fuck did I do right, wrong, or indifferent that I got Patton Oswalt, Jeffree Starr, and the head of the goddamned Lincoln Project praising my shark-riddled ass on the same day?

It’s probably worth thinking about?

I had a moment of thinking, as I wrote the last tweet in the series: this would be a better story if I was lying. I could say I’m lying, to prove the point. Lying about lying, very avant garde, no? Or at least lying about some small detail of it. Goddamn it, should have lied. A better writer would have lied. Oh well. And though a few people tried to clock me and ask if this really happened or was just an object lesson in the unknowability of truth, thousands didn’t think for a second it was anything but true, or at least, true enough.

And it is true. This essay isn’t going to climax in me pulling the tablecloth out from under the glasses and revealing that I was never a camp counselor, I hate children, and you’re all fools. FOOLS, I TELL YOU. I really was in charge of 10-12 small monsters for 12 weeks in 1999, I really did lie my ass off about sharks the whole time and reveal that I was way more boring than I let on at the end of camp like a super shitty magician. 

Now, one of the things that I love in fiction is cheeky little methods of establishing authority in the text. What makes a passage feel and sound real as opposed to Standard Fictional Voice of Whatever Genre? How can I just barely almost trick readers into thinking I’m telling the truth before I hit them with the Obviously Unreal Thing? What are the specific styles that evoke that feeling of I am reading a real thing about the real world written by someone who knows a lot more than I do so even if it seems a little off, they probably know what they’re talking about? Tim O’Brien is probably the master of this kind of thing, the guy literally tells you he’s going to lie to you at the beginning of every chapter of The Things They Carried, and then you fall for it anyway, every single time, because he’s that good, and everything about who he is seems like this is a story that should have happened to him, even though it didn’t. And you believe him specifically because he told you he was going to lie to you, so your backbrain was like ha ha this guy is being so real with me, he’s letting me behind the curtain, he’s being straight-up from word one, writers never admit they’re lying so he must be the most truthful one of all! So I can totally relax now, Tim’s just a cool dude who tells it like it is and if I really need to know something, he’ll tell me that later just like he’s telling me this now.

Sound familiar?

This was a major concern of the OG magical realists, whose preferred solution was to describe unusual things in the accepted journalistic style of the time, of the newspapers where many of them worked as young writers. That house style, through which readers regularly received information they believed without question, provided a shortcut around the natural ha ha it’s just a story level of unbelief that surrounds any remotely speculative ficiton and straight into the monkey brain part of us that is always and forever SUSPICIOUS AF of the dark.

This shit is like catnip to postmodernists and whatever the fuck we’re doing now that we’re past postmodernism but hurt ourselves in our confusion by calling the hot new thing in the 60s, which was neither hot, nor new, nor one singular thing, nor, like most rebellious movements did it actually begin in the 60s but gets credited to them, postmodernism, a word that feels pretty goddamned final when you consider that post-postmodernism sounds like hot trash.

There are a lot of other ways to invest a story with authority, and most of them have to do with writing things that aren’t stories at all, or at least not formatted like stories. Journal entries, footnotes, passages from other (yet still fictional) books, including the author by name as a third party character involved in obtaining the manuscript somehow (noted postmodernist Edgar Rice Burroughs did this with every one of his Mars books) quotes from invented authorities like Princess Irulan’s histories that begin each chapter in Dune, Tolkien’s songs and languages in Lord of the Rings, any kind of ephemera like articles, letters, scripts, critical/academic essays whose form and technique departs from the standard array of fictional tones. 

And I’m SUPER INTO ALL OF IT LOL HAVE YOU MET RADIANCE? 

I went through a whole period in my short fiction, starting witha story called A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica, which I can only fairly describe as an actual addiction to miming authority, cloaking an unreal story in styles and structures that dripped with academic notation or contract law or advertising marketing jargon, anything that made it feel like I didn’t so much write it as found it, and therefore it can be trusted completely. Anything that short-circuited disbelief. The equivalent of wearing a lab coat or a tweed suit--appearing in the trappings of the expert on high, then using that established trust to tell you ice goblins are real and one time I got bitten by a shark.

You will of course, notice that the lab coat features prominently on this very Patreon. I didn’t earn it, I wasn’t issued it as part of a job. I ordered it off Amazon so I could look like a scientist, which is obviously more respectable than a hawker of weird fairy tales. And I think that’s where a lot of my interest in Authority Drag comes from—because I started out publishing so young and so female and so weird, I wasn’t taken seriously from the jump, so I was and am continually fascinated by what cues audiences to make those choices: to believe and not to believe, to respect and not to respect, to acknowledge as an authority and to dismiss out of hand.

And now? Fucking now? In 2020? These questions are so much more urgent an issue than anyone is talking about. When random bots on Facebook can sound authoritative enough to convince people not to vaccinate their children, we are having a crisis of fiction vs. non-fiction. Entirely fictional elements intruding on the real world and having very real, very serious effects on human life. And a lot of people have quietly figured out new answers (because the old ones stopped working so well) to what I thought was an artistic question and they knew all along was a political one: how do you fashion language to short-circuit the everyday armor of our accepted relationship to reality?

Whoops. Load from last save.

Fantasy and reality are strung out and living on the lam together these days, it’s all a mess, and somehow all this feels connected—the use of certain kinds of tones and styles that have been deployed in the past to convey authority, but more than that, authenticity, are being used now to convey not just fiction but purposeful lies. It is a world not so full of magical realists anymore, but bubbling over with reality magicians.

And part of it is that what we consider authoritative and/or authentic prose/literature/phrasing/format/structure/WHATEVER has completely changed in the last twenty-five years—and utterly transformed in the last fifty. 

So what I want to do here is look at those tweets about that damned shark and examine how they establish authority. Not because I want to toot my own dumbass plastic horn about how great they are (they’re not) but because what feels true is so dangerous these days. Because understanding how to use mimed authority in fiction means being able to see its use everywhere. Because Twitter is a weird fucking truth ranch these days, my friends, and the cows have twelve horns and a blue checkmark each. 

And I have a blue checkmark, in and of itself a mark of authority and ostensible truth-telling which gets wildly mis-used and misunderstood every minute of every hour. 

So. The shark. The summer job. The kids. The lies. The reveal. Whence their truthiness, as Stephen Colbert, high wizard of signalling authority in a world where you are 100% an imposter, would say? Whence their weight? What is it about these 367 words that resulted in a viral tweet only 12 people questioned the truth of and 9 had anything negative to say about (which in and of itself is pretty much on par with murder hornets in terms of unlikely 2020 events)?

Let’s pick it apart.

Here’s the tweets, pulled off of the media platform and formatted like fiction:

So I have severe scars all over my legs. They are very dramatic.

When I was 19 I was a camp counselor with some horrible little demons under my care. All summer I told them I got the scars in a shark attack in Baja. I was very specific in every detail. They were enthralled. Sometimes the only way I could get them to do anything but try to murder each other over Pokemon cards was to share a new detail about my shark attack. I was the Scheherezade of spoiled angry pre-teens.

At the end of the summer I told them the truth: I ran through a plate glass door when I was 10.

They were stunned. They felt so betrayed. I told them that’s how I’d felt while they lied to me all summer. We talked for a long time about lies & stories & sharks & doors. & at the end they asked for another shark story anyway.

I’ve never forgotten. I think about it every time I look at my legs. How hard it was to keep up such a lie for so long, how much it thrilled them. How they didn’t tell one lie the whole final week of camp. And how, even though they knew it wasn’t real, they still wanted the story. In the end, they liked the lie & wanted more of it, because it spoke of a larger, dangerous, exciting world. They were willing to give up their anger & the moral high ground for more.

And when I see people preaching Q*non out there, I think about the shark that never bit me.

I became a writer, obviously, because I am good at the exciting lie. Other people are also good at it, & use their talents to invent different sharks, other waters, other lessons.

Remember, when you see it, those kids begging for more sharks, because the truth just wasn’t as fun

But not just that.

They wanted the thrill they felt when they thought it was real. The fix of being near a story of blood & danger & monsters. They preferred that world to the real one. Eyes open, completely aware. They chose the monsters.

Don’t be surprised when adults do, too.

So the irony of all this energy around my shark bullshit is that I actually have been bitten by a shark. I just don’t have a scar from it. It happened much later, because I didn’t get into snorkeling or even really swimming in the ocean until my late 20s when I married a a guy who would have lived in a wetsuit if you’d let him, and on the other side of the country, because I’ve never actually been to Baja at all, but eventually I got my little punishment for the summer of the Big Lie. 

It wasn’t half as dramatic as I made out to those kids. Just a little nurse shark in Florida, not even full grown. Size of a big bass, tops. I am very bad at the diving part of snorkeling and was practicing, flopping around like an idiot with lungs full of super buoyant air. I must have disturbed somebody hiding in the kelp—this l o n g b o y e popped out and clamped down on my forearm, not hard enough to end my career as a right-hander, but hard enough to tell me I was cordially invited to GTFO. I cannot stress enough how much the shark did not commit to this bite. It was the whatever, I don’t even care, man bite of an ironic detached hipster fish. Nevertheless, I did not handle it with aplomb. I immediately sucked a bunch of water through my snorkel because screaming underwater is very cool and very logical. He let go pretty quick, and I got to get up close and friendly with the still shrink-wrapped first aid kit in our car because lol what insurance. I had a bastard of a bruise and some minor bleeding once I got my suit off, but what I remember isn’t pain so much as the pressure. Just how strong and tight his jaws were, how totally powerless and immobile I was even in the face of a quite small, usually harmless real life actual shark, and how much less exciting it was (and how much less cool I turned out to be) than I’d made it out to be in the faces of all those enthralled kids that summer.

The vast majority of reality is just boring, and that’s part of the problem.

Now, part of the reason all those tweets felt real was simply that they were tweets. Twitter has become a Place of Authority, pretty much thanks to the Tangerine Trujillo himself. During the Obama years, politicians had Twitter accounts, but mostly run by interns with boring focus-grouped statements on them. Then this one asshole leveraged running a troll acount for eight years into the Presidency and started issuing insane government proclamations 280 characters at a time, and all of the sudden my Memories of Bad Summer Jobs past appears on your timeline right next to the actual President talking, a trusted news anchor, your mom, your best friend from high school, a major burger chain barfing up performative snark everyone knows is performative, your favorite author, the head of the CDC, fucking Captain Picard, and the Secretary of Energy.

The human brain is VERY BAD at switching from accepting authority to doubting it that quickly. Twitter’s format evens out everyone’s speech so that it’s in the same font, on the same background, the same basic length and accepted methods of emphasis (asterisks, all caps, slashes etc to replace html markup Twitter doesn’t allow) and signalling in-group membership (hashtags, emojis) scrolling by like it’s all the same. Having to click over to a blog or an article (unless its hosted on a site which itself conveys authority) removes a little of this magic, which is part of why we’re all FUCKING TWEETING 27 TIMES IN A ROW RATHER THAN BLOGGING LIKE WE USED TO.

Past a certain point, and that point is way lower than you think, the mere fact that a tweet is being retweeted and liked invests it with authority, even if the retweets are actually arguing with the premise. Twitter’s UI also borrows authority from bigger accounts who retweet something, because retweets appear in the timeline as though the retweeter wrote it, and we have to decide to look down at the smaller, fainter notation at the bottom pointing to the account that originated it. If 100 people INCLUDING MY CONGRESSMAN/DAD/NEWS ANCHOR/NEIL DEGRASSE-TYSON thought this was right and worth sharing, it’s gotta be right!

And that’s how bots stole an election, kids.

But that’s all exteriority, the same way ideas being bound into a book, especially a book with a professionally-designed cover and available in a physical bookstore, especially a hardback with quotes from more famous authors whose opinions you value on the jacket, confers authority on them. 

The tweetstorm itself starts with the word So. So I have severe scars all over my legs. Like we were already having a conversation, just the two of us, and I organically thought of something to say and segued into it. There’s already an ease between us, since it feels like we were casually chatting, maybe even laughing about something, and then I was like oh yeah, that reminds me! So…

It also immediately tells you something that’s wrong with me. Some imperfection, something I might not even want most people to know. I have these horrible scars. They are very dramatic. Now we are intimate, as though we know each other in real life, because you know something ugly about me. What person, especially a woman on the internet, would talk about their body being so unpleasant and mangled if they didn’t have to to make a point, if they didn’t actually have dramatic scars? 

People are just so much more likely to believe anything you say if you shit on yourself a little before you say it. 

Comedians use this tactic all the time to get you on their side. Pay attention the next time you watch stand-up: the comic will almost always get up there, accept the applause, then say something self-deprecating about their looks, their voice, their race, sexuality, or gender, their clothes, their socio-economic status, their age, or their family. The more conventionally attractive or default demographic they are, the more brutal this self-own is likely to be. It won’t always be savage, but it’ll be something. They have to even out the power dynamic a little to make the audience comfortable. These people are paying money to watch another person talk—they already kind of hate the comic a little for being the one in this scenario who gets paid money to do something they do every day, they already kind of suspect the comic is arrogant and thinks they’re better than everyone else just because they’re up there on the stage. But the comic dumps on themselves a bit and everyone laughs at them for a minute instead of with them, the room feels a little more equal and everyone relaxes ha ha you took my money and everyone listens when you talk but I got to laugh at your expense so really we’re the same.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

And it’s all a game.

So then, having established our intimacy and that I am willing to make myself appear unattractive and broken in order to make whatever point I’m going to make, I say mean things about children! The internet is divided on the topic of children—many hate them, so they enjoy seeing them called horrible little demons, and the rest have them, so they either can’t stand their own and get a thrill from the shade or enjoy other people’s children being described that way. It’s also pretty important to establish early on that these specific children are bad and rotten and no-good, so that when I tell the entire internet about how I lied to them, only 9 people are going to yell at me for lying to children and ruining their lives. It’s setting up a karmic justification, which almost all humans simulataneously know rarely happens in real life but desperately need to believe it does and find holistically fucking satisfying when they witness or experience it. Then there’s a few solid details like the Pokemon cards, which establish that time and that place and feel true to anyone who was alive then. Those little details that are completely unimportant to the story itself are vital to making it feel good and real and right—who gives a shit if the kids fought about Pokemon cards specifically when this is 367 words about Qanon, ultimately? Well, no one, except that Pokemon cards were astonishingly hot commodities in the summer of 99, and that concretizes the idea that this really happened and I was really there, precisely because why include such an irrelevancy unless it’s a real memory where such details naturally and always intrude?

What follows is the only line with any literary flair to it, conveniently reassuring everyone these kids were also rich so it’s okay to delight in their hurt: I was the Scheherezade of spoiled angry pre-teens.

Most people don’t trust language that’s too fancy unless they’ve already signed up for some fancy shit by buying a book or whatever. That’s not what encyclopedias or textbooks or conversation between friends sounds like. More importantly in 2020, that’s not what social media sounds like. When it comes to authority and authenticity, you can never sound too polished or too put together. You have to sound a little casual, a little like you’re just winging it, and it’s best if you occasionally fuck up. Flub a word on your podcast, reference a problem with your cosplay contacts on your YouTube video. Or, in this case, think that you’re going to be able to tell your story in three tweets and so label the first one 1/3, the second 2/3, and then say fuck it and hope no one notices while you leave numbers off the next ten. That was wholly unintentional, I talk too fucking much and should know better than to think I can plan ahead. But it contributed hugely to the overall effect. It was a lie I told at the beginning of a story about lies, after all. But also it was a mistake that made me look down to earth and the story unplanned, and as we all know from the 2016 debates, planning ahead and preparing means you’re an inauthentic robot.

I am convinced that the reason I received so little hate for these tweets is that the twist, what the story is really about, comes like seven tweets deep. You actually have to read the whole thing to get to the part where it swerves into the political, and by then, I’ve already pretty much got you on my side. That, and I spelled Qanon with an asterisk so their little search algorithms didn’t ping, a trick I learned during Gamergate, because we have to pick up survival tricks now like it’s fucking Vietnam just to get through a day on the internet. The story starts to elevate out of the everyday with the reveal of where the scars actually came from and why I lied, then crests with the line about giving up the moral high ground for more story, then turns it all around and connects this thing about children (the ultimate in authenticity—people constantly assume the behavior of children is an illustration of the natural state of humanity—but the nadir of authority, since people simultaneously do not care what children have to say about anything or believe them when they open their mouths) to a bigger thing about adults that baffles everyone not already involved in it. 

It feels true to one group of people because we are all seeing people choose to believe lies right now. It feels true to another group because they were disarmed by a story about children and sharks and unprepared after seven fully 280 character tweets to think about conspiracy theories in a critical light, the very thing that normally makes them intractably defensive and aggressive. The old bait and switch, you might say.

And that is incredibly fucking effective in fiction. It’s all over Space Opera HA HA FUNNY EUROVISION CAMP GLITTER ROCK N ROLL YOKO ONO LOL CLIPPY HAVE YOU CONSIDERED HOW FUCKED UP EVERYTHING IS AND HOW WE TREAT EACH OTHER LIKE SINFUL MEAT? And not just in fiction, either, it’s a super common technique in long-form journalism and essays, it’s even why Rachel Maddow starts most of her segments with a digression about the history of Afghani jewelry or some shit.

It’s all about getting past the audience’s defenses and pre-formed opinions about what is right and real and actionable and worthy. 

The thing is, not everyone has figured out yet that what feels authoritative and authentic isn’t journalistic at all anymore. We no longer live in Borges and Marquez’ world. Official media has lied to us too many times, for one thing, and now the whole government, Authority with a capital A, is calling more or less all news fake news and our brains are now re-calibrated to question formats that previously expressed an air of utter trustworthiness.

Now, what feels trustworthy to a lot of people, is anything that does not format itself authoritatively. We’ve had a long, long time to grow accustomed to the tone and local quirks of social media, and almost anything that comes through channels we have chosen ourselves and seeded with voices we trust feels more intimate, factual, and absorbing than a real news report, briefing, or article. 

It’s why commercials love putting a YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok frame around their ad for shaving cream. Millions of people have now self-programmed to react to visual cues like that by sorting the content inside the frame into the “not corporate, not selling me anything, just cool people making content for fun” category and reducing their defensiveness to it. 

This is a fucking arms race.

Corporations chase authenticity in order to more effectively increase affection and attachment to their products (hence the HELLO FELLOW KIDS brand Twitter accounts throwing shade designed to go viral and make you think Wendy’s is so hip and with it) by doing an end-run around the jaded consumer-brain who’s seen it all and decided already whether or not to buy it.

The Martian is an amazing example of this in fiction. The whole thing reads very specifically like a Reddit post—in part because it started out as one—and that makes it feel authentic and Mark Watney feel real and immediate in a way much better written works don’t. We’re all reading Social Media Voice every day, it’s how the world comes to us, so a story, even a speculative one, that hits that same way is going to feel intimate and real and authoritative even if it also feels awkward and shallow and a little disorganized—because those are markers of someone being “real” with you rather than planning and editing a narrative meticulously like a robot nerd shill.

We have been so relentlessly sold to and battered with information all our lives that we have begun to defend ourselves by rejecting the truth of anything that sounds too polished as having ulterior motives.

And the Mango Mussolini sounds anything but polished. So he must be telling the truth, right? Because if he were lying and tricking them and selling them something, he’d sound better, look better, have a better team around him. That’s what decades of the authenticity arms race has done. If it looks and sounds good, it’s a trick. If he were lying, he’d be better at it.

And all this, all of it, is why we are where we are. 

Almost all the conspiracy theories and insanely false narratives and bloody fever-dream constructions of reality people are using to push their way through life started out on 8chan and filtered down through social media until each person found it on a platform and in a format they trusted. 4chan and 8chan flatten posts out the way Twitter does, it all appears the same, true or not, same font, same lingo, same background. They both have completely normal and legitimate stuff hosted there…in specifically curated forums walled off from the real crazy over there. The same way Fox News has a normal news hour segment where anchors are allowed to criticize the current administration so that people can point to the network as a whole and say it’s not that bad, there’s balance, they’re not biased. You genuinely would not believe how much of the madhouse shit that suddenly appears in your digital awareness fully-formed from the head of the god of garbage was polished and crowd-sourced on the chan boards, from Gamergate to Pizzagate to Qanon itself. It trickles down from there to Reddit usually, and thence to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and especially YouTube, because televised media still holds a position of primal authority for us and YouTube is basically TV now. Ask any mouth-frothing over-hashtagged bleater on Twitter to back up their claims and I guarantee you they will, when they answer you at all, link you to a YouTube video.

And the format and lingo of social media has become so well-understood and uniform that bots can easily replicate it and spread an idea faster than its refutation could ever imagine. Slang (authority from the bottom, you can believe me because I speak your language and am thus cool and have the pulse of the youth) changes fast, but since most people used slightly outdated slang ironically online in order to appear sincere (lateral authority—we are peers because we both understand this use of language is silly and transient and we are both above it, using it only to make fun of the group who uses it sincerely), it doesn’t actually change fast enough to present any kind of a problem. Anyone can be anyone on the internet, always its greatest power and greatest weakness, so when someone on 4chan claims to be a high-up government employee getting the truth out to you and you specifically because you’re so special that you understood the secret code (authority from the top—believe me because I have more power and information than you, and authority from selection—now you have authority because you are better than others, you understand something secret and special) well, that has to be real, doesn’t it? A faker would go to the New York Times if they wanted their story to get out. Fake stuff looks slick, airtight, produced. Like all the commercials that said one brand of deoderant would make someone love us or the glossy photo spreads of a life we could all have if we worked hard enough. A liar would be smoother, write more grammatically, wouldn’t use all the hashtags and acronyms and slogans because they’d want to look super professional so everyone would believe them, and more than anything else, they would make sure their predictions were at least plausibly right every time. 

If it wasn’t real, it would look better.

It’s a very small leap from that to: the truth looks like a pile of unprofessional shit no normal person would believe.

Our brains haven’t caught up. Quality lies don’t look glossy anymore. Corporations and governments clued in on that a long time ago. Now they look authentic, crowdfunded, crowdsourced, integrated into the digital background. Now they look like the average guy with carefully messed up but not too messed up hair very deliberately not wearing a suit, ranting so very sincerely about how the fucking earth is fucking flat on YouTube in a messy room that, my goodness, looks just like your room!

But underneath all these ways of lying, it’s still just us. It’s still just us kids who want to be excited by something. None of this would work so well if we didn’t want it. If we didn’t need it. If we weren’t all so starving for love, attention, and drama. If it weren’t completely intoxicating for a tired mom who no one appreciates to suddenly have thousands of people listening to her and loving her on Facebook if she posts the right idea about vaccines and natural living in just the right way. If it didn’t pump the happy chemicals so hard for a guy who works IT and lives in a bare apartment no one visits to tell a story online where he is a valiant knight fighting against the forces of cannibal satanic baby-eating pedophiles and have millions hanging on his every dropped pariticiple? 

If life and reality weren’t so often boring and unsatisfying that the endorphin-hit of a story that feels good and right enough to convince us for a moment that reality is exactly as exciting as fantasy weren’t the core addiction of the history of mankind.

We want to be lied to. We demand good lies. We demand to be part of a story. But it better be simple and it better be dramatic and you better tell it to me in a way that makes me feel special and chosen. Holy fuck what was the POINT of all those STORIES we got raised on as kids if you can’t grow up and BE IN A COOL-ASS ONE? We used to use religion to tell us the binary story of light vs dark where we are always the ones on the side of light, and they are always on the side of darkness, and the world is just and metes out fate according to our deeds. Our culture grows more secular but this longing goes nowhere, it is deeper than DNA. A hundred or so years of tedium and pain broken up by bursts of art, sex, parties, family, and feasts—we want to make the bursts last as long as possible. If we’re part of a huge epic story that involves the whole universe or at least our own culture, they can last forever. Life is an excruciating fetch-quest for dopamine loot-boxes.

But when we find them, they feel so beautiful. They feel so right.

The world scars us, and we invent the shark to explain it.

Without the shark, it’s just broken flesh. Ugliness without purpose.

We choose the monsters, both us and the kids I taught that summer, because monsters make more sense to us. Monsters are easy. Monsters can even be fun, if you’re far enough away. If it’s your camp counselor whose legs get fucked up and not you, who’ve never yet seen the ocean. Proximity to, yet safety from danger is like emotional umami—not one of the Big Flavors you learned in school, but it’s the business once you know what you’re looking for. Cozy inside during a storm. Rubbernecking an accident you’re not involved in. Getting the gossip on some disaster of a personal life that you can feel good about because at least you’re not that far gone. Seeing a scary movie when you’re safe in your seat with popcorn. A roller coaster that feels totally out of control but is safety-rated beyond mortal understanding.

Believing government is a battle between baby-eating satanist democrats and true knights of the realm when you will never be called to sacrifice anything for that battle, the BESD will never come for you, your life will never be threatened by the forces of darkness, and you genuinely believe you will never personally be harmed by the policies of those true authentic knights because you’re special and on the inside—it’s adrenalin without risk, the heroin our body makes for free by itself.

Add to that how fucking good it feels for we silly, sad, social primates to belong, anywhere, to anything, and you’ve got a stew going. A stew most people will happily give up almost anything to gorge themselves on. Even basic rights. Look at what people have given up for religion throughout history—to belong to a group, and to be part of a story.

Eventually, it’s pretty easy to forget that the BESD won’t come for you because they never actually existed, especially when so many sets of algorithms slowly fashioned your online experience so everyone around you was chasing that same beautiful dragon. And it feels better, anyway. It feels so much better to believe that you’re not getting what you want because of a vast conspiracy of overpowering entities than that people just suck a lot of the time and don’t care enough to do the right thing. It feels true. It feels right. (And it feels better to believe it’s Democrats being nasty ice goblins no matter what side you’re on because they actually care and will respond, whereas the actual ice goblins dgaf what you have to say about it.)

Goddamn, it feels so much better if it was a shark you’ll almost certainly never meet than a plate glass door exactly like the one in your own house, that thing that looks so normal, that could hurt you like it hurt your counselor any time. It sucks to live your life believing that. So you make another choice. You choose the monsters—but only the monsters you think you’ll never find. Glass not being up to code because landlords are lazy is a monster too quotidian to satisfy the human heart’s need for that good umami.

So yeah, we’re never going to evolve past this. The only possible road around is to learn to recognize attempts to establish authority and authenticity, even if it plays directly into what you think you know to be true, what you believe about the world, what you believe about the speaker, what you believe about yourself. Especially if. And then you have to keep updating your anti-viral software, because the arms race is ongoing, and it will only get worse and harder to spot. The lies will be so integrated into the background of life that you and your neighbor may not even agree on any fundamental aspect of reality, even whether or not it’s particularly hot today OH WAIT THAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING.

You have to accept that your brain is primed to choose fiction. To choose the shark. Overconfidence in anyone’s ability to discern objective reality has been the downfall of many an okay person who is now an asshole. But not only are you built to choose the lie, you’re built to tell the lie. We do it all the time, we exaggerate, self-aggrandize, tell tall tales, elaborate our stories with a bit of flair, misinterpret what we see and keep doing it til our actual physical memory changes, all of it, always. Personal folklore, every bit as magic and malleable as the kind with fairies. We learn how to talk and act so people will love and believe us from the earliest age, we are masters of it. And we use it to tell truths and lies in equal measure. 

I do it all the time. Not just in my novels. On Twitter. Here. I use ALL CAPS because it’s funny and because that’s part of the online vocabularly for sincere humor. I reference memes and geek-centered media which signals an in-group identity. I self-deprecate and tell you about my garbage brain and my failures and make light of virtually everything about myself. I call myself a dumbass every other essay, you guys. And I address myself to you guys so you’ll feel like I’m talking directly to you even though I’m obviously not, I’m typing in an office in Maine and forgetting what I wrote as soon as I upload it. 

And I lie. Not the big stuff. You know who I am and basically where I live and what I look like and that I really do have a two year old son, not a creepy doll. We agree on the basic social contract of you being here with me on Patreon, which is extra authentic because you’re choosing to be here, you are select, you are special. (You are!) We all agree to these little artifices whenever we read an essay or listen to a comic or engage in almost any kind of media that holds court in the first person. Little lies. I tell you that I wrote those tweets while drinking wine after midnight while watching Real Housewives when I wrote them at 8pm stone-cold sober and half of you probably knew I don’t fucking watch Real Housewives, but I do watch some acknowledged trash and it fit the scene so you shrugged and moved on. Please, I was watching Elementary. It has an entire British person in it, ipso facto, fancy trash.

And I’ve never been bitten by a shark. Not in 1999 or any other year, not in Baja, not in Florida. Not by a Great White and not by a nurse shark. The only place I have ever seen a shark in real life is in an aquarium. I told you in the beginning this essay was all about lies and authority and I told you about Tim O’Brien and I told you I wished I’d lied in the original tweets and I even told you how it was done, and maybe some of you quirked an eyebrow at that story, but I bet most of you just churned on through and by this point had almost completely forgotten that part. The part surrounded by verifiable facts, the part that started with So…and had just enough specific details about my ex-husband and made fun of myself for not being brave or cool in the moment and then moved right on without a breath.

But it felt good to read that part, didn’t it? That I got a little comeuppance from Mother Nature for lying to a bunch of kids, which, no matter how good a story it makes now, was obviously a dick move? It didn’t matter, really, but it felt right. It felt like a thing that should have happened in a just world. That easily could have happened. But it didn’t. I’ve never even snorkeled in Florida.

Lies about a just world are the easiest ones to sell.

In the end, we are all stories looking for audiences. Even those of us who will never write one word of prose. All we are are our stories about ourselves, built day by day over the course of years. We bump into other stories, entangle with them, leave them behind, seek out more. We choose what motifs and allegories we allow in our tales, though we rarely see the plot twists coming. And stories are delicate chemical reactions between lies and the truth, always hungry for excitement and meaning and what feels correct according to the programming of a billion stories before us.

We now live in a world whose reality can and will be argued, vociferously, at every turn. I don’t really think we get to step out of that world at any point. Just step carefully. Know that you are a machine for processing stories, that almost every country on this planet is now and always has been fighting wars to establish their chosen story, but now they’ve figured out it’s way cheaper to fight that fight on the internet, and the perfect lie is the one that comes to you in your own voice.

So.

I actually, honestly and truly, really was bitten by a shark one time…