B is for Bullshit, Bacteria, and Bureaucrats.

26 Letters in the English alphabet is quite a lot: many, many languages' alphabets are considerably smaller. Looking locally, the Te Reo Maori alphabet is only 20 characters long, with just 9 consonants. But to listen to te Reo, even if you can't understand it, is to hear the laughter of water in a sparkling sunlit creek.

But the 26 characters available to English speakers! What music can be made with them! We have a million words to play with! Such a capacity for beauty and grace...

None of which, unfortunately, appears in the following.

The letter B always feels like we're working with, you know, the second-best letter. You get an A for a paper, you're a hot-dog. Get a B, and, well, you're depressed, wondering where you've gone wrong, how you're a failure, that you may as well go to Taihape and die in disgrace... and all that Bullshit.

We lie to ourselves all the time. We lie to others more often than we like to admit. We tell ourselves we're well. We tell ourselves we're sick so we can phone the Boss for a day off. We tell ourselves we're in love because the person involved "needs me". (A filthy trick I am guilty of employing in the now distant past. "How can you not love me when I need you so?" Sad and pathetic. Self-destructive, too.)

When a friend calls and invites us out and all we want is a night with a bar of Whitakers, a bottle of Merlot, and the cat... we lie, and say we're booked with people coming from Taihape to visit. (Perhaps your old pal, the B-degree loser from Taihape...).

Bullshit can and will be excusable. But Bullshit can also damn us to a lifetime of regret and pain. See: earlier confession. I haven't consciously lied to another person in over 20, probably 25, years. I've been tempted, certainly. Generally when I've been afraid of the consequences of telling the truth. But I still lie to myself, regardless of consequences. 

About pain. About love-handles, about looking like Denzel Washington. Actually, that last isn't a lie. The resemblance is uncanny. These are good lies: I can convince myself that pain is fleeting, and that it's not an important part of my life. Oddly, I think I believe that lie. 

 And hey: if I don't look for them, the love-handles don't exist.

But lies, real lies? They breed, like Bacteria. And Ajax Spray n Wipe, which kills 99% of all household Bacteria, doesn't kill these little bastards, no matter how much you drink. Nor will Rum, Whisky, Gin, Wine, or Beer. 

And in order to keep track of lies, you have to have a brain like a Bureaucrat's: neat little boxes that record each and every lie, lengths of coloured string pinning one lie to another, until the real world disappears.

These was once an acronym*, pronounced Whyzeewig. WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get. It's so much easier to be a person who wears his or her heart on his sleeve. And trousers legs and sox and scarves. And underwear. Being a completely open person is calming, relaxing, and joyful. And, I really don't care if anyone disapproves of me, dislikes me, or finds me lacking in some way. It's their problem, not mine.

*All Acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms. To be an Acronym, the abbreviation must be pronounceable: NATO, NASA, WYSIWIG, DoC. An abbreviation that can't be pronounced is just an abbreviation: CSI, NZG, NZP, NZDF, FBI. I wish someone would tell our "News" readers this.