Stranger than. . .

It's something of a surprise to realize that I've reached a point in my life where I find "truth" orders of magnitude more interesting than fiction. Growing up, I never had much use for non-fiction; I liked history and science well enough, but I so admired the creativity that went into inventing a story that I reserved all my free time for novels. My room up in Boston - the library - is so full of literature and sci-fi that I've spent weeks shelving books, and I still don't have them organized. Some of the books are undeniably trash; others are the "great works" of Chaucer, Dostoyevsky, Colette, Marquez. . . And yet the only fiction I've even browsed since I got up here has been the children's stories I read to Patrick every night.

Instead, I've been spending my time with the Wall Street Journal, with books of essays, with ettiquette primers, and with research. It's all crazier than any civilization I could have made up. Jazz-Age slang. The quest to make a low-fat donut. The booby-trapped "money pit" on Oak Island, a million times more dangerous and more mysterious than anything faced by Indiana Jones. Cities of insane, drug-addicted "mole people" living their entire lives in the tunnels of the New York Subway system.

I don't know what makes these adventures more interesting than those that have been invented. To be sure, they have notably less symbolism, but, on the other hand, the characters are more fully developed. Perhaps it is the knowlege that it isn't farce or fantasy - the very fact that it is real spawns the question of how it came about, whereas in fiction one simply accepts "assumed conditions" like teleporters and the coincidence of running into someone you knew as a child.

I think I finally understand why some people felt so betrayed by the Blair Witch "hoax".