So this is how Matt Damon and Ben Affleck got famous? For anyone who missed the suitcase nuke dropped on a sycophantic Nashville commentariat this morning, their beloved “Gas Guy” revealed *gasp* The Truth(tm).

“What,� you cry aloud “You weren’t telling us the whole truth about your life?� Well, of course I wasn’t. This isn’t a court of law. Gas Guy is a character, not a human being. He reflects certain aspects of my life, principally the thing I do for beer money between English lit and rhetoric seminars that would bore most people to tears. There is no savant devoid of formal education standing in a gas station in Tennessee. I don’t even live in Tennessee. Honestly, I’ve never set foot in the state. Shocked? Horrified? Pleased and delighted? Does it matter at all? Not really.

I kind of had a feeling about this. That scene in The Silence of the Lambs kept playing over in my head where Hannibal Lecter had warned Jodie Foster about the “elaboration of a bad liar”. But the Gas Guy is neither bad or a liar. I’ve enjoyed some of these things he’s written. Particularly this one: “Evil”

I’d like to think that his creative writing experiment would make some people rethink the way they project their own biases to fill the gaps in what they don’t know, or worse, intentionally deceive themselves to only see what they want to see – but that would be giving some people too much credit. And we know how the Gas Guy feels about extending credit.

Consider it an important and inexpensive lesson. And a well played one.

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