Background: A very good, old friend called me tonight with a story that sounded a little fishy. I called someone in the know (law-wise) and checked some facts. This is the millionth time this friend has called me with a story of woe, and I’m sure it’s the millionth time he’s lied to me about something for NO GOOD REASON. I’m completely convinced he is a pathological liar. I dated a guy a long time ago that was a pathological liar, and this guy has demonstrated the exact same tendancies. (No, IANAD.) The story he attempted to sell me is an issue near and dear to my heart, and he knows this. He’s known this since he met me. And for the record, this is not the best friend that I usually rant about, for once.
And now, the rant.
I cannot stand people who lie to me. If your existence is SO FUCKING BORING, then write a goddamn book or something. Don’t call me with your pathetic sob story, concocted out of bullshit and half-truths.
Why do people feel the need to lie about stupid shit? Or even make up stories entirely? Do you need my attention and validation that fucking much? What makes my opinion of you so goddamn special? Am I on a pedestal that I don’t know about? WHY IS IT SO GODDAMN IMPORTANT THAT I PITY YOU, OR VALIDATE YOUR FUCKING EXISTENCE? It’s not like I don’t pay any attention to you. It’s not like I drop everything to throw you a pity party worthy of a Jerry Lewis Telethon. It’s not like I haven’t spent the past 12 years of my life being your best friend. I will love you as a friend no matter what, but you have got to QUIT FUCKING LYING to me! You have enough drama in your life without having to MANUFACTURE MORE! What the fucking hell is wrong with you?
I know it’s an attention ploy. I know both of our lives have changed drastically in the past year. I know that I don’t get to talk to you as much as I used to. But that doesn’t mean that you need to LIE TO ME to get my attention and/or friendship! I would love to be able to give you as much attention as you obviously need so desperately, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and I spend at least 23 and a half of them trying to live my life. Selfish, but necessary for my own survival at this point. I cannot possibly devote as much attention to you as you feel you warrant. I hate the fact that you feel the need to fabricate a story, because you know damn good and well how it’s going to make me feel. Especially the story you chose to feed me tonight.
I don’t want to give up on this friendship, and there’s no way I can tell you to quit lying to me, because I know it will never happen. You’ll always need to elaborate some miniscule event until it becomes the “Lifetime Movie of the Week”. I love you, you’re a really good friend to me, but it FUCKING HURTS me that you lie to me. The fact that you’re one of the few friends I have left is the one tenuous strand that keeps me clinging to you. You listen to me when I talk, you tell me when I’m wrong, and you support me when I’m down. I guess I’ll just have to continue to depend on you when I need you, and take everything you say with a grain of salt.
Why do I have such horrible taste in friends? And why has it taken me this long to realize just how full of crap my friend is? :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
Muwah ha ha ha ha ha! Thank you. I needed that, DDG.
Nope. He knows that I hate handguns. So, he called me a week ago, gleefully, to tell me he had recently obtained a concealed weapons permit. Whoopty do, right? He called me tonight to tell me that he got pulled over on the way home from work today for a broken taillight. When the officer asked him if he had any weapons or drugs in the car, he told the officer that he had a gun in the trunk that he had recently purchased at a gun show, but did not have a permit onhand for it. He said that the officer then put him under arrest, and he spent the afternoon and early evening in lockup.
So, with his nefarious past, I called my sister’s husband, who is a US Marshal. He said that there are too many details in the story that just don’t jibe, and that it’s more than likely that my friend is full o’ crap. I have no proof that he’s lying, so I can’t really say anything to my friend.
The sad part is that I’m more pissed off at him for maybe lying than I am at him for potentially being enough of a dumbass to drive around with an unliscensed gun in the trunk of his car.
Boy did I learn that one the hard way! I just settled a custody issue this morning with an ex who was, how shall we say, less than totally discreet. The thing is, I am enough of Jerk in real life that she could have stuck to the truth (why just the other day, I passed someone on the right! On the Right I say!)
Anyways, to say that sorting all the lies & half truths out just so I could see my flesh & blood daughter again was about as straightforward as the Pacific Ocean is Yellow.
There’s one thing I have noticed about pathogical liars. They are about as insecure & terrified of being “discovered” as Ann Coulter is conservative. Which is all well & good until you run head-on into said insecurities. And the thing is they will just not stop fighting & denieing, no matter how hopeless the situation. And man, can that be dangerous.
I guess that was an overley verbose echo to ReadNecks post, but seriously Skerri, hat’s off to your being supportive & that, but you may want to keep some distance. I know that for me, from now on, I treat anyone in my life I find to be a PA the same as I would a hard-core drug addict.
“When you lie, you murder some part of the world.”
–Merlin, Excalibur
I’ll never understand liars. I guess some of them want attention and sympathy, some want to gain an advantage, and some are just screwing with you for the sake of it alone. Any of those ways, they’re worthless sacks of crap.
Don’t waste your time on a liar, they’re never worth the effort.
Arrests are a matter of public record. If you want to verify what happened, just go to the police station and ask. They’ll be able to tell you whether he was arrested, and if so, what for. Then you’ll have some facts to smear in his face.
Skerri, I had a friend, a very very close friend, who told a lot of stories too. He completely manipulated me without me even realizing it. Bit by bit, things came apart, and I realized that he had been lying to me practically the entire time we’d known each other, including the 8 months that we lived together.
I finally couldn’t take it anymore when I called to talk to him, got his SO on the phone, who informed me that he’d been living and working in another city for the past 3 weeks. Some best friend, huh?
Skerri, if his story doesn’t pan out, if it turns out he’s been lying, a suggestion I would offer is to just let him slowly fade out of your life. No one needs to be manipulated like that.
I have no idea where you live, but I’m in Northern Virginia, very close to Washington, DC. In Virginia, no license or permit is required to carry a hadngun about your person, but a permit is necessary to carry it concealed. In other words, wearing a Wild West six-gun and holster is generally legal with no permit, but carrying a shoulder holster covered by a coat requires a permit.
In DC, private ownership of handguns is completely forbidden; there is no generally-available permit.
So… if your friend lived here… he might well call you one week to say he’d got a concealed weapons permit, and get arrested in DC a week later for being in possession of a handgun.
Of course, I have no idea where you (or he) actually live. But the story doesn’t sound absolutely impossible. If all this happened in one jurisdiction, I agree it begins to sound a bit iffy - but even then, I’d want to see what the specific laws of the jurisdiction were.
He lives in Nashville. He has a concealed weapon permit, but he told me that the gun that was in the trunk was a loaded .45 that he bought on Saturday at a gun show. Now, I realize that ammunition may be available at gun shows, but who loads the weapon and puts it in the trunk of the car, much less leaves it there for a few days knowing they didn’t have the permit for that particular gun? And if he had a receipt stating that the gun was purchased three days before, wouldn’t that be sufficient enough evidence that the gun was purchased legally? These are not the things that made me think he was lying, these are just questions that I raised to myself while talking to him.
His story had time inconsistancies, the reason why he was pulled over in the first place changed halfway through the story, and when his brother came in the room, he “needed to go” and would call later. :rolleyes:
He’s lied to me before, but this is getting ridiculous.
That is fucking rediculous. Lucky for me I’ve never had to deal with someone like this.
There have been a lot of times I’ve had friends of friends that I would hear stories liek this about, but I never had to deal with them. That’s really for the better because I can say I would not just not believe what they said, I simply wouldn’t talk to them.
Obviously, I can’t relate with you Skerri on a personal level, but it seems to me maintaining such a relationship will only get harder on you - not just from trying to sort out reality, but in damaging your ability to actually trust others.
I’m not telling you to forget about a friendship, but I think you should seriously consider the ramifications of continuing to deal with someone who obviously does not have your well-being anywhere on his list of priorities.
I love pathological liars. I had one friend who’d give me false job tips because he apparently felt the need to be an inside source on something. Annoying bastard.
I dunno about there, but here in Minnesota, the violation would be that the gun was loaded. When transporting a firearm, the gun must be unloaded and cased, with the ammunition carried separately.
He’s an idiot, he got busted, and now he’s going to pay the price.
If he protests too much, just outright tell him “You were caught carrying an unlicensed, LOADED firearm. You blew it, you got busted. Deal with it.”
I’m sorry Skerri. Liars can cause a world of hurt.
I used to be that person. As I grew up, I learned that the best way to deal with stuff was to lie. Less hassle, less trouble and nobody got upset. I became a champion liar.
I caught myself lying to my boyfriend, at 19 I think, over something unimportant. I stopped dead and spent a while thinking about why I had lied to someone I loved over something so immaterial. I decided I didn’t like the person I was. I also decided I could blame my parents for unintentionally raising me to lie, or I could realise I was an adult and could fix the situation myself. I went to an extreme and actually hurt a few people by my refusal to even tell ‘white lies’. Things are good, now that I live honestly. I feel good about myself and don’t have to worry about getting ‘caught out’.
I hope your friend turns a new leaf too but to be honest, until he does, I would stay far away. Liars can hurt. Surround yourself with loving, honest, friendly people.
As I was just recently saying to my very good friend, Denzel Washington, I’ve found that a policy of scroupulous honesty is the only way to live your life. Take, for example, the time I was testifying before congress, and they asked if I had any knowledge about the new stealth bomber that I felt the American people needed to know about. Now, I could have kept quiet about that faulty widget, but I knew that lying would get me no where. So I told the congressmen all about the widget, then revealed my simple solution on how to repair them. It all paid off for me a few years later when I found myself piloting that very same stealth bomber over Baghdad…
