John Ramsey Miller

I really hated to do it, but I was forced to put my chickens on lock down for several days last week. That might not seem like a big thing, but if you sell eggs as “Free-Range” and presently, after a major poultry insurrection, they are in fact “lock-down” eggs… Until they get that we moved their coop two hundred yards into the field so we could have grass over the dirt in our yard… See where I’m going? They keep returning to their old coop and it’s occupied with new baby chickens so we had to gather them up two and three at a time and drive them to the new place on the four-wheeler.

So our printed cartons read, “Susie’s Free-Range eggs” so I had to take one of those fat Sharpies and make truth-in-advertising alterations.
I have this thing about lying. I mean I do it, but I’m not happy about it and I’d like to quit doing it. But the truth is people expect you to do it. If you ever answer truthfully a question like: “Does this hat make my ass look wide?” and it actually does, you are so screwed.

I think about the truth a lot, and I am always working to evade it. I practice denial, often with almost professional results. Sixty is the new forty, I am in the best shape of my life, my mind is a steel trap… There’s nothing wrong with self-delusion if you know how to practice it correctly and with the proper diligence.

Fiction isn’t about lying, it’s about telling a story that originates in your mind, and hopefully could happen, but just hasn’t yet as far as we know, but sure as hell might.

This is not a political statement, but yesterday President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he hasn’t earned it yet. I don’t blame him for accepting it, but next year, don’t be surprised if Michael Moore gets the Nobel Prize for Economics, and Nicholas Sparks gets it for literature.