constant lying — 1 explainer, sort of

the supermarket aisle four is where i make most of my mistakes. constant lying, the article said, leaves a trail. the landlord’s last note used the word constant. tom, mentioned in passing, also used that word once. an e-reader counts as reading. constant counts as habitual. the cart wobbles.

writing this from the desk at 9:18 in the morning, which is when i can think without anyone looking. carla is upstairs in an annual planning meeting that nobody invited me to and nobody will miss me from. i have, generously, until lunch.

so the question of the morning, before the cart wobble fades from memory, is whether the word i keep stepping on actually means what i think it means. or what the landlord thinks it means. or what tom thought it meant in 2017, the last time he said it about me with a face.

constant lying, the table version

here is the comparison that nobody asked for and that i will defend at the bar tonight, assuming mike shows up and assuming the bar still serves people who haven’t paid their tab in a credible window. i made the table by hand on the foolscap pad before typing it, because the foolscap version felt more honest. it wasn’t.

the frequency column is mine. i made it up at the supermarket while the cart did its small left-tilt routine on the linoleum near the cereal. constant, i decided, is the version of the word a person uses when they want to be clear without being cruel. it’s how the manual on the shows i watch tends to phrase things before the lawyer arrives in scene three. for the broader background on the family of words, the liar pillar i keep returning to is where i logged the original taxonomy back when i was still pretending the taxonomy was for somebody else.

constant vs habitual, the small print

here is the thing about constant lying that nobody puts in the table. constant is about rate. habitual is about reflex. you can lie at a constant rate and not be habitual, the way i pay rent at a constant rate without doing it on time. and you can be habitual without being constant, like the man who only calls on the third sunday of the month but always opens with the same lie about why he’s calling.

the small print on how to stop pathological lying as a working term is also worth flagging here, because the internet wants to collapse all five rows of my table into one diagnosis with a hyphen. it isn’t one diagnosis. it’s five doors in a hallway, and the door marked constant is the one most people are actually standing in front of. the rest of the hallway is theatre.

tom would call this ‘committed’, less generous

tom and i went to university and then he went to a house with a wife and a child and a mortgage and i went to this desk. we are both, i’d argue, valid configurations of a person. mine has more naps. tom, when he used the word constant about me in 2017, did not mean it as the table-row-two version. he meant it as a moral grade. he meant, *you are committed to this*, the way a person commits to a hobby they refuse to admit is a hobby.

tom is the kind of person who would have ranked the rows in my table by something other than landlord-friendliness. he’d have ranked them by, i don’t know, civic damage. that’s tom. he reads on a kindle, by the way, which i bring up because reading on a kindle is the same as reading, and i need that established before i continue. tom and i agree on this one. we agree on three things total. this is one of them.

the landlord’s note that used the word ‘constant’

the landlord’s note arrived in the bilingual envelope, which is his envelope of choice when he wants me to know he means it. the note said, in the version i remember, that my late-payment behavior had become *constant*. he underlined the word with a ruler. the ruler is the part that haunts me. you do not own a ruler in adulthood unless you intend to underline things.

the note went into the drawer with the other certified letters, which is technically a way of dealing with mail and technically not. for the related territory on uncontrollable lying as a working label, my earlier working definition of compulsive lying covers the row of the table that the landlord has not yet picked.

the supermarket where i thought about it for too long

back to the supermarket. aisle four, which is where the cereal lives, which is also where the cart wobbles for reasons related to the linoleum and unrelated to my behavior. i was holding two boxes and trying to decide whether buying both counted as a small lie to myself about how often i eat cereal. stefan, who is the wine man at the bar (and who will explain at length that any cereal containing fruit is a vegetable), would have had an opinion. mike, if i’d called him, would have said something about taxes.

so i stood there with the boxes and ran the table in my head. occasional cereal: virtuous. constant cereal: a pattern. habitual cereal: a personality. chronic cereal: a problem. compulsive cereal: get help. i bought both boxes. i counted that as constant, not habitual, on the grounds that the second box was for the microwave_seventh, which uses a lot of cereal in the way it uses a lot of everything. it died last april. its absence still uses cereal.

i passed the third_yoga_mat in the home goods aisle on the way out, which i mention only because the third_yoga_mat is also constant, in the sense that it’s been under my couch since 2023 and shows no sign of moving. constant is, increasingly, my favorite word for the things i don’t intend to fix.

verdict, constant is the kindest and least flattering

so here’s where the table lands. constant is the word a generous person uses for behavior they could have called something worse. it’s a four out of ten. it’s a polite note in a bilingual envelope. it’s the cereal i bought in pairs at the supermarket while a film about lawyers played in my head, specifically the one where jim carrey can’t lie for a day, on imdb’s record of liar liar, which is the only film i’ve ever watched where the protagonist solves his problem by being forced into the row of the table he was avoiding.

constant is the kindest of the labels. it’s also the least flattering, because it’s the one the people in your life pick when they’ve thought about the other rows and chosen not to use them yet. tom, the landlord, mike at the bar, the woman at the supermarket who watched me put two boxes of cereal in the cart and made eye contact in a way that meant something — they all picked constant. they could have picked worse. they were being generous. it counts.

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