AI was used in the process of making this. It argued with me, tried to hand me a few good details that never actually happened, and I threw them out. The idea and the judgment calls are mine, and this is about what happens to truth once somebody else gets hold of it.
I have a line I believe and almost never say to anybody.
It is three words. Truth is soup. That is the whole thing, and if I say it cold to a person standing in front of me, I have to follow it with about a paragraph, and nobody hands you a paragraph. You get a sentence, maybe two if the other person is feeling generous, and then the moment goes back to whatever it was already about.
So mostly I have written it down instead. It has its own section in the first Blue-Collar Mystic, where a reader already has a couple hundred pages of me and the thing can stand on its own.
The few times I have said it out loud, nothing happened. No argument, no laugh, nobody looked at me funny. There was just no reading on the face at all, the way it goes when somebody hears a sound, files it, and keeps walking.
I think it landed anyway, but I can’t know that. I have no way to get in there and check.
Truth goes through people. By the time it reaches somebody it has come through their history and whatever they were already afraid of. What comes out the other side is not exactly what went in. It is theirs now.
That does not mean everybody is right. This is where the idea usually goes soft and starts sounding like something printed on a mug. A person can be wrong. Flat wrong, about a thing that has an answer you could go check, and the fact that they are living inside a version that makes sense to them does not move that answer one inch. If someone is wrong, it is still their version of the truth and they justify it however they want.
Bad soup is still soup. It is still what they are eating, and it will tell you what they are running on. It does not tell you it is any good.
We choose what we swallow, but not what we taste.
I do not completely trust that line. It comes apart the second you hold it up to the light.
The tasting part is easy to defend. Something reaches you and you have a reaction before you have an opinion. The gut goes first and you did not vote on it.
The swallowing is supposed to be where you get a say, and I still think mostly it is. But choosing is not one moment. It is a few thousand of them strung out over years, and the first several are barely choices at all. It also assumes there was something else on the table. Somebody raised on one thing, with nothing else in reach, did not pick anything. They ate what was in front of them, because that is what there was.
The part that sits with me worst is that sometimes you cannot tell, because plenty of people are manipulative. Somebody can season a thing long before it gets anywhere near you, and you taste exactly what they set you up to taste, and you swallow it believing you decided.
So where does it turn into yours. I do not know. I hold people responsible for what they keep eating after they had a real shot at spitting it out. I just cannot always tell you when that shot showed up. That includes me.
I had a manager once who read several of my books. She liked them, she liked the way I saw things, and she said so. Eventually she stopped buying them, because I was putting them out faster than she could get through them, which is either a compliment or a scheduling problem, and I have decided it is both.
She gave me a handwritten card one time.
She put the soup thing in it. And she had it slightly wrong, or slightly different, depending on how you want to say it. What I had written was that if you are going to share it with the world, you might as well stir the pot. What came back to me, in her handwriting, was that truth is soup, and if you are going to share it with others, it is best to stir it first.
She did not hand me back my sentence. She handed me back hers, with mine somewhere down in it.
I felt seen and appreciated. That is the whole feeling and I am not going to dress it up into something bigger.
Not everybody at the table is being straight with me. If they know it is bad and continue anyways, they obviously have something driving it that makes sense to them. Inside their own setup it holds together fine.
And I can see it. I can follow it far enough to see how somebody gets there.
It still does not mean I have to eat it.
Understanding somebody is not agreeing with them. It is not staying quiet about it either, and it does not put me in debt to them. Nobody has ever been obligated to swallow a thing just because they could explain why it got cooked.
If someone has some soup that I absolutely can’t swallow, I spit it out and let them know why.
Out loud, with a reason. They do not have to eat mine instead. Just no, and here is what is in it that I will not take.
Me spitting it out does not make me right. I have got my own filter working the entire time, same as anybody. Turning something down is not standing outside the pot. It is one guy at the table saying what he will not put in his mouth.
I still cannot tell what lands.
I have a picture of the card.
If the first taste was never mine, and somebody may have salted it before it ever got to me, then how much of what I am running on right now did I actually choose, and how much did I just never spit out.
I am not sure I can tell from in here. I am not sure anybody can.
From The Grey Zone
The rest of it lives at the site. https://thegreyzone.xyz
Tip the Kitchen
The kitchen stays open on tips. If this one gave you something worth keeping, the jar is here. https://ko-fi.com/mastergreygray
Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.