compulsive pathological liar — 1 explainer, sort of
compulsive pathological liar — 1 explainer, sort of
in the apartment, the pulpit is wherever you are standing when you stop apologizing. compulsive pathological liar, fine, sure, both of those, but not on the topic of pizza. a cold slice belongs in the morning hours. heated pies are a supper food. maggie disagreed once. maggie was wrong. the rest of the table, dishonest as it was, was right.
that paragraph i wrote earlier, at the kitchen counter, before i came in. it is the entire thesis. the rest of this post is, broadly, footnotes. typed at the desk now, since carla is upstairs in the training session and i have, by my own pessimistic reckoning, until 11:23am.
writing this from the desk. carla took a folder into the third-floor training and a small water bottle, which i read as her expectation of staying in the room past lunch.
DROPPING. THE. AND. DOES. NOT. MERGE. THE. RUNGS.
compulsive pathological liar, opening pulpit from the kitchen counter
so. the search bar fused them. somebody, this morning, typed compulsive pathological liar with no conjunction at all, as if “compulsive” and “pathological” were a single, double-barrelled adjective that lands together, like “freezing cold” or “burning hot”. it is not the same thing. and yet here we are, ranking on a phrase that grammatically wants an “and” in the middle and culturally has decided it does not need one. the missing conjunction tells you, broadly, where the public is — which is tired, and typing.
i have written, separately, the general field guide to the word “liar”, which is the pillar of this small library. read that one if you want the rung-chart. read this one if you want the pulpit, which i delivered, originally, to the microwave at 8:14 this morning, in a robe, with cold pizza in one hand and the seventh microwave humming behind me about its own irrelevance. the apartment, when carla is not in it, is the kind of room a man can preach in.
let me put this on the wall, metaphorically, since i don’t have a printer at the apartment, and the printer at this office is a political object.
cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner. i have, on this hill, planted the flag for the better part of a decade. the flag is small. the flag has tomato sauce on it. the flag is not coming down.
the false authority i declined to consult
i did not, before writing this, look up compulsive pathological liar in any of the websites that put the word “trait” in a helpful little box. i declined. i have, in the receipt wallet on my desk, three folded receipts older than the receipts themselves are supposed to be, and one of them, on the back, in pencil, has the working definition i drafted last december at this same desk during a different meeting on the same third floor. that’s the source. that’s the manual they don’t reference on the shows i watch.
the working definition reads, and i am paraphrasing my own pencil: a compulsive liar lies as a twitch under mild pressure; a pathological liar lies as architecture across years; a person searching for both phrases at once, with no “and”, is looking for a single human who does both. that single human, statistically, exists. i have met one, briefly, in 2019, at a party i did not enjoy. he is not in this post. he is the spectre of this post. the post is mostly about pizza.
which brings me back to cold pizza, the rung-chart’s least controversial example of what i am willing to defend in public. i am, in the strict sense, a man with priorities. i am not, by any reading, a compulsive pathological liar. i am, however, prepared to lie on the small front of did you have a real breakfast when the answer is i had two slices of last night’s pepperoni standing over the kitchen counter, because that is, on inspection, a real breakfast. the lie is that it isn’t. the truth is that it is.
exhibit one, cold pizza at 8am is breakfast
the case begins here. you have leftover pizza in the fridge from the night before. it is, by morning, cold, congealed, and structurally improved. the cheese has set. the grease has retreated to the box. the crust has, overnight, become a slightly tougher version of itself. this is not a degradation. this is a transformation. it is, frankly, a better object than it was at 9pm.
now. the public, mistakenly, believes that a breakfast is defined by ingredients. a breakfast, the public says, must contain eggs, oats, fruit, or yogurt. this is, on a strict reading, not in any rulebook i can find, and i looked. a breakfast is defined by position in the day. a breakfast is the thing eaten between waking and noon. that is the only requirement. the rest is theatre.
cold pizza, eaten at 8am, satisfies the position-in-the-day test cleanly. it is, therefore, breakfast. the only reason it is not socially regarded as a breakfast is because cold pizza does not belong to the breakfast lobby, which is run, primarily, by the makers of cereal — a substance that is, on its own and without cultural support, soup with rules. the cereal lobby has spent eighty years convincing the english-speaking world that breakfast is a category with a perimeter. it is not. the perimeter is the morning. nothing else.
i have, this week, eaten cold pizza for breakfast on tuesday and on this morning. i have, on the same week, eaten hot pizza for dinner on monday. the cold pizza of tuesday morning was the same pizza, materially, as the hot pizza of monday night. it changed function across the calendar. that is the entire argument.
exhibit two, the leftover slice and the moral void
i should also, in the interest of completeness, address the people who claim leftover pizza should be reheated. these people, broadly, are the same people who make their bed on weekdays. i don’t engage with their reasoning because their reasoning is, fundamentally, a different operating system. they believe in restoring objects to a previous state. i believe objects pass through states the way rivers pass through countries. the cold slice is not a wounded hot slice. the cold slice is its own animal.
i have, in the apartment, the seventh microwave i have killed, and i would like to be on the record: i did not buy that microwave to reheat pizza. i bought it to heat soup, which is the only food that genuinely benefits from being warm twice. the microwave knows this. the microwave and i have, broadly, an understanding. it heats soup. it does not get involved in the pizza question. neither do i. the pizza question is settled at room temperature.
which, by the way, is also where the third yoga mat lives — under the couch, at room temperature, since 2023, gathering, by my count, dust and a faint suggestion of having once been useful. i mention the yoga mat because it, too, has been the subject of polite lies. when somebody asks if i have started “stretching in the mornings”, i say “i am working on my mornings”. this is, on the rung-chart, strategic. it is not pathological. it is not, by any reading, compulsive. it is a man buying himself the rest of the conversation.
and it is, in fact, partly true. i am, this morning, working on my mornings. the morning, today, contains cold pizza. that is a working morning.
exhibit three, maggie would never, but maggie has employees
which brings me, reluctantly, to maggie. maggie ran, briefly, three coffees in 2019, a long, thin, doomed lunch at a place that no longer exists, and a single argument across a small table in which she insisted, with the calm authority of a woman who would later have employees with payroll, that cold pizza was, and i quote her, “a sad meal”. maggie now runs a small business with two employees and a payroll system, by which i mean she lives in a different country of adulthood than i do, and her opinions on my breakfast are, structurally, no longer my problem.
but i remember the argument. i remember the small table. i remember her looking, briefly, at the slice in my hand and then at me, and i remember being, for about four seconds, persuaded. that’s the rung. that’s the test. a regular liar can be temporarily persuaded by a confident woman with strong table manners. a compulsive pathological liar, as the public is now spelling it without conjunctions, would have invented, on the spot, a story about how he was, in fact, eating that slice for medical reasons or for a column he was writing. i did neither. i ate the slice. i finished the slice. i was, at the time, four seconds embarrassed and, at present, zero seconds embarrassed. that’s the difference.
also, while we are here, on the topic of fool: only a fool argues breakfast definitions across a small table with a woman who keeps proper accounts. i was a fool that lunch. i remain, in the broader sense, a fool. that’s covered in the separate field guide on what counts as a fool and what counts as a man committed to a position. the position, in this post, is the slice. the slice is the position.
closing pulpit, i rest my case at the kitchen counter
so here is, broadly, where i land. compulsive pathological liar, with no conjunction, is what people type when they are looking for one human who does both — the twitch and the architecture, fused. that human exists. that human is rare. that human is not me, and is not, statistically, you, and is not the man at the kitchen counter at 8am with cold pizza in one hand.
the man at the kitchen counter is a regular liar with priorities. he tells the landlord the sink is fine. he tells his mother he is eating well. he tells the unopened mail pile, by ignoring it, that it is not, today, his problem. he tells the seventh microwave, by humming back at it, that they are still partners. he does not, however, tell strangers at petrol stations that he used to play professional rugby in argentina. that is the line. that is the rung.
and on the small, defensible front of pizza: the cold slice in the morning is a sandwich without bread and a meal without apology. the heated slice in the evening is a different object entirely. the morning slice and the evening slice share a name and a recipe and nothing else. they are two separate animals that happen to wear the same fur. the conjunction is missing. the meaning is not.
i rest my case. partially. the rest is in the box on the kitchen counter, in the apartment, where the pulpit lives, and where, broadly, i return tonight.
training session let out. carla walked past the desk holding a printout and a slightly tired expression. she did not stop. that’s, on a tuesday, neither good nor bad. it is, on the rung-chart, neutral.
the receipt wallet, by my elbow, has gained one receipt this week. the seventh microwave is, at this hour, idle. the third yoga mat is, statistically, where it was. the pizza box, in the kitchen at the apartment, has, by my mental map, two slices remaining. they are cold by now. they are, therefore, breakfast. tomorrow morning is technically pre-arranged.
the slice is the position. the position is the slice. the conjunction is missing. the meaning is not.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
cold-pizza counsel, kitchen counter division, with the receipt wallet as witness
P.S. the two remaining slices, by my count this morning, will become breakfast at 7:50am tomorrow, which is, technically, the only meal in this apartment with a confirmed appointment.
