Urban Legends - And Not Old School Rap Superstars

I have a book that sits in my bathroom that is filled with urban legends written in comic book form.

It’s fantastic. In case you haven’t heard of the wonderful world of urban myths, they’re fantastic stories that are told over and over again as true, but are in fact not true.

The Richard Gere/gerbil story comes to mind.

Essentially, I know a lot of these urban myths because of this book and I just heard a coworker tell one as true:

“The one time my dad went hunting he spotted like a ten point buck. It was big, we’re talking like ten points on one side. So he takes a shot and gets it. He was so excited! He wanted to get a picture of it, so he puts the gun in the deer’s antlers. This was back when he was sill an alcoholic… So he puts his gun in the deer’s antlers and stands back to take a picture, and the deer jumps up and takes off with his gun! It was like so big that one shot couldn’t take it down!”

Good story, fun story, untrue story. I find it sort of sweet and sad that this woman’s drunken father told her a story about himself that was a lie. Usually that is sort of the job of that fun and drunken uncle. It was nice of dad to step up like that.

I wanted more than anything to turn around and tell my coworker, calmly and nicely: “That story’s an urban myth, it’s not true. Your daddy lied to you.” You know, in my best ‘I’m brilliant’ voice.

But what I’ve learned is that people do not want to hear when the stories they believe are true, turn out not to be. If I were a better writer, I would throw in some veiled reference to ‘ignorance is bliss’, but I won’t. I learned this the hard way when a roommate totally flipped when I pointed out that his story about his friend’s friend’s dad waking up in a strange place, drugged and missing a kidney, was an urban legend.

A lot of times people prefer to believe in a lie, and that’s cool.