:: Wednesday, March 7, 2001 ::

 

4:03 p.m. Pretty scene, eh? Proof positive that I've been out of the house, at least yesterday.

I guess it's not legal proof, however, unless there was a way to get a passerby to hold up that day's newspaper, and even then I could have constructed the whole scene, or paid off the passerby, or desktop-published the newspaper.

In fact, maybe this isn't really a corner in Venice on a Tuesday afternoon in the sun. Maybe it's a Photoshop rendition, cut and pasted together from various file snaps. Maybe those clouds are really from Siberia or Liberia or maybe -- just maybe -- they never existed at all. Maybe they're just swirls of baby blue and ochre and vivid fax-paper white.

Would that I were that good.

I did take this photo by standing right in the middle of the street, with traffic coming on. The place where I was standing was actually the middle of the Grand Venice Canal, were this moment happening 80 or so years in the past.

Hard to believe that this solid ground was once flowing past, moving with a speed to equal those scudding clouds, but it's the truth. At least, according to the old timers in town, it's the truth, but I can't prove it.

We actually, each of us, believe what we want to believe. See what we want to see.

When one of our children came to visit from out of town, I was thrilled to take her, late at night, to a famous restaurant catty-corner to the building in the picture. It's one of the cool places in our neck of the woods and it was hopping with all the cool people, even late at night.

We parked the car, let the valet take it away, and walked under the fabric flaps at the front door. It's a Japanese restaurant. What in the world does that fabric signify or mean? No one will tell me. No one seems to know. I surmise that it's to brush bad thoughts away, but I could be wrong.

Once we were safely home and tucked in for the night, she confessed that she had been a nervous wreck, wondering why we'd take her to a place that actually had bars on the windows. What hard and dangerous part of town were we in?

And we, the clueless 'rents, never "saw" the bars, but saw instead what we wanted to see.

The odd thing about the truth is that you can't prove much. As a bona fide member of the media, I should know better than to believe what I read in the paper or in a magazine or a tabloid, but I really can't help myself. Even if I'm part of the story, (and I have been) the part that gets printed is the part that gets quoted and that's the part that gets to be called the truth, even if it's not.

Worse, some people lie. They are vigorous in this act, and they often are point-perfect with their arguments and their denials and their rebuttals. If you're not in the habit of lying, you probably scoff at keeping a careful record of your every act, your every utterance.

It can be exhausting and it is, ultimately quite a futile exercise. So, I see you've stopped beating your wife, eh?