"Post Facto Confession"

The relatively easiest posts for me to write – and I stress the word “relatively” because none of them are actually easy – and if I were “that kind of person” I would add, “And if you don’t believe me you can try it yourself” but I’m not so I won’t – the relatively easiest posts for me to write are about things that have actually occurred.

That’s what I did last time.  (“At Your Service”, 4/26/19.)  I took an event involving a company, informing me by mail that they are going to give me some money, offering available phone access for the recovery of that money, and then making that access unavailable for over two days, succeeding only when I called at three-twenty A.M. and even then it took three calls to finally get through.

I don’t like those people.  I’d have preferred if they’d instead sent me a letter saying,

“We have money for you.  And while assuring you otherwise, we are making the recovery of that money as difficult to collect as we possibly can.”

At least that would be honest.

Anyway, enough about the anonymous company I’ll call “Entertainment Partners.”  They may be partners with somebody but it sure wasn’t me. 

Posts like that are relatively easy for me to write because an event took place, and I simply told you about it.  Hopefully, in an interesting fashion, because the story itself – if it did not happen to you, and perhaps even if it did – is not inherently scintillating.

“But you told it so beautifully.”

Thank you.  Unless that was facetious.

Hey!  Where did they go?

My whole job with the story was connecting the narrative dots, with minimal embellishment, exaggeration, leaving stuff out, or moving stuff around.  I told the story, just as I experienced it.

“But you did mess with it a little.”

Oh, you’re back.  So was that facetious?

“Was what facetious?”

“But you told it so beautifully.”

And now they’re gone again.

Okay, I did mess with the story a little.  Most deliberately, I was aware, but neglected to mention, that there was an option of mailing in the request for the money coming to me.  I did not originally notice that alternate option, as it appeared on the back of the letter.  On the front of the letter, they said I could call them “seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.”  The “mail-in” was apparently a backup, but the company assured me I didn’t need it.  And, indeed, I didn’t.  I just had to call in at three-twenty A.M.    

So the you have it.  Excluding the secondary tidbit concerning the “mail-in”, I somewhat altered the narrative.

Leaving me guilty of “somewhat.” 

Which leads to a television review of the FX miniseries Fosse/Verdon, chronicling the intricate relationship between genius choreographer Bob Fosse and dancer/musical star/Fosse’s ex-wife, Gwen Verdon.

In passing, the “biopic’s” review speaks specifically to the foregoing issue.  This excerpt is included because it is the clearest articulation of that issue I have ever encountered.

Written by Robert Lloyd (L.A. Times, April the 9^th, 2019):

“Every person is a mystery, even to himself or herself, and even the most thoroughly researched biography (or, for that matter, autobiography, all narrators being fundamentally unreliable) is no more than a hypothesis, a theory of a case that can never be settled.” 

Great!

“Are you being facetious?” 

Yes.  (And I am not running away!)

That's so annoying.  I work hard, chronicling events as truthfully as I can.  And it’s “no more than a ‘hypothesis’”?  I might as well write fiction!

No.

That’s me, blowing off steam.

There will be no fiction coming from me.  Though I do fictionalize somewhat.

And I felt it my blogatorial duty to come clean.