Verisimilitude And Naked Chainsaw Massacres

Verisimilitude is my favorite word of all time. It really is. The way it rolls off the tongue and is relatively easy to say, the way it sounds difficult to say when you hear it said, and the fact that in my line of work, if I use it correctly in a sentence, I sound like a friggin’ genius.

Verisimilitude. Pretty cool word, huh? You can look it up if you want. Believe me, it is in Webster’s. It basically means “for the sake of realism or believability”. That’s how I define it in my head. Get the true lowdown if you’d like.

Don’t worry. I am not sensitive in that way.

So most of my chain saw story was true. How about 80%? Something like that.. And the other 20% had some relevance to me and what actually happened, making the facts an odd rendition of truth. How do like that?

There IS a property in Pocket Canyon exactly like that. I spent Y2K in the hot tub there with a pretty girl, and we had gone through a case of very expensive wine. The wineries I worked for would give me the days leavings, and I would take them home. When a bottle had only about a glass left in it, it wasn’t worth gassing and saving for the next day’s tasting room stock. So they gave them to people like me. I wasn’t a winery employee, so no one could start an argument about employee preferential treatment. The good news was that I got to enjoy some very wonderful wines for free. The bad news was that I developed a snobby palette, and now I can’t afford to drink what I learned to enjoy.

Having drunk so much wine in such hot water, made me start to see double. There were twins in the tub with me, as far as I was concerned. And this girl who kept dividing had wanted to be a stewardess when she first came out to California, and I did call her Sweetie so Sugar and Candy were not too far off.

And nearing midnight I did hear a rummaging around in the tool shed, and I jumped out of the tub naked and I was indeed all shriveled and cold and I ran toward the shed like a heroic streaker, but I stopped after I stepped on some sticker thing that really got into my foot and made me hop around.

I owned six chain saws but four of them didn’t work. There WAS a guy in there, and I yelled at him from a distance.

“Hey, Get the fuck out of there!” or something like that. The guy tried to run out the door with my best chainsaw, but the bar struck the jamb and it fell out of his hands as he ran downhill toward the two lane road that was labeled as a “highway” on maps but had dwindled down in use over time. The road was now the back way to Guerneville, which was used by drinkers to get home at night, and dudes like the guy I just ran out of our tool storage shed, to sneak around on.

I did shout “welcome to the new millennium!” into the night fog, and the twenty minutes leading up to that, was spent speculating on what would have happened had I got into a fight while naked with the guy in the shed.

I’m guessing it would have likely happened just as I described...

Nrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmm!!

So there you have it. The truth laid bare. The real truth. The simple and believable truth, told with enough basic facts for verisimilitude.

What IS interesting is how much we will dismiss if there is one piece of the story that does not ring true whatsoever.

A good lesson for those who tell stories.

And just as interesting, is the possibility of never being believed again.

My street credo has been tarred and feathered by my own hand.

If I told you I once spontaneously combusted in front of a pretty famous person, you are not likely to believe me.

If I told you I’ve seen two UFO’s, you’re gonna think “hmmm...” and wonder.

If I told you I scored a goal from twenty feet BEHIND the centerline playing soccer, you’re gonna start thinking about what you’re gonna have for dinner.

And those are all true, by the way. I mean, would I lie?