First things first: is anyone watching Breaking Bad? Goddamn, that’s a great show, but unrelentingly dark and tense. My stomach hurts and the end of every episode, but in a good way. You know, like I’ve just eaten a really entertaining but enormous burrito. Last week’s episode was particularly intense, as the young dealer, Jessie—on orders from meth-cooker Walt to get his ripped-off money back from a couple of tweakers—went to their house only to find their little neglected kid wandering around hungry in his underpants. Just a crushing scene, especially when the dirtbag parents came back. These characters were pretty damn skeevy for TV drug addicts. Usually drug addicts on TV are just hot actresses with dirt rubbed on their faces who have been told to scratch their arms a lot. But this was the whole deal: filth, boils on their faces, etc. Check it out. It sure ain’t feel-good TV, but then again, I never walk away from American Idol feeling particularly good, either.

Anyway, on to an un-TV-related point: My friend—we’ll call her Betty, even though she knows damn well who she is—enjoys sharing stories with me every day about some alibi or another that she’s concocted to get out of something with a friend. It usually involves telling someone that they never got their invitation: either the voicemail never came through, or randomly only came through five hours later, or the email got dumped into her spam folder. And we laugh and laugh together aobut her chicanery. Ha, ha, chicanery! And yet I now realize that any time I invite her to get our families together and she says Wow, she really wants to, but they can’t make it for X reason…X reason is probably horseshit. She swears that no, she would never pull that crap with me, but who are we kidding? And I recently recalled phoning her a couple of years ago to see if she and her husband and daughter wanted to join us at a museum. I didn’t hear back until the end of the day, when she said, with a sense of dramatic shock, “That is so weird, I only just got your voicemail right now!” An excuse that is still in her top 5 of bullshittery. I call retroactive bullshit!

But how can I get angry when I use those fake alibis myself? Well, not that one exactly, but when I’m really late to respond to an email, I have been known to eventually write back with, “Wow, I just found this in my Spam folder! Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, but I’m just seeing it now!” I think that Spam was originally invented to give people an excuse not to respond to friends for weeks: the ability to blanket people with penis-enlargement supplements was just a happy byproduct.

But when someone says, “Wow, that’s weird, I never got your voicemail,” or uses the spam excuse, and you know deep down that they’re lying, you’ve got a problem. You can’t call them on it, no matter how sure you are, because the surer you are only implicates you more as someone who does that him or herself. Imagine you accuse them of lying. Then they say, “What are you talking about? My voicemail is screwy!” Then you’re left to hammer them over and over, until you bring out the most definitive proof you have: “I known you're lying because I say that tons of time, and my voicemail has never once dropped a call, or postponed it five hours!” You have then given them the freedom to keep denying it, while calling you paranoid and a bad friend to others. It only exposes you. It’d be like if you noticed someone had red-stained hands, and you knew firsthand that the only way to get those particular stains is if you spend your weekends strangling hobos. How can you make that point without revealing that you have a bloody bindle collection in your own basement?

Has anybody ever really been late returning a call because a voicemail delayed the message by hours? Is that even something voicemail does? And I’d be curious to hear how often people blame spam folders for tardy email replies: Sure, sometimes important emails do get sent to spam, but what’s the ratio of spam-to-lie? I'm guessing it's about 1:5. And, most importantly, are my friend and I the only ones using these excuses, and this entire post has—ironically—done nothing but expose me as a filthy liar and a bad person? That brings to mind a joke I told during my incredibly brief post-college standup comedy career (like, two months). I said how the danger of attempting Seinfeldian observational comedy is that you may publicly discover that what you thought was universal behavior turned out to just be your own freakishness. i.e. “You remember when you used to go to carnivals when you were a kid? And remember those merry-go-rounds? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Remember how every time, before you’d get on one of those horses, you always had to lick the seat? Uh…hello?”

Incidentally, thanks to everyone for their feedback on my recent conundrum about whether or not to make a stink. The consensus seems to be "Be a dick, but a rational dick." Or, rather, firm yet fairly dickish. I will attempt this.