Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Week of 1/20
**Prove what the author is trying to tell you about life (the moral)
Pages read: 769-833   (Short Story: "All The Lies That Are My Life")

Most of the short stories in the Harlan Ellison omnibus that I've been reading have some sort of sci-fi factor or twist to it, but "All The Lies That Are My Life" was one of the few that didn't.  From the top of my head, I can only remember two other stories that didn't include some sort of scifi in it. One, I remember, was really clever and entertaining. The other, not so much. In the introduction before this story, Ellison mentions that he had been working on the story for just about 12 years, so naturally I was expecting this to be a great story. He also said that "All The Lies That Are My Life" was the longest story in the Shatterday book, so I was hoping that the story that was the longest, was one of the best. I didn't want to read a very long story if it wasn't very good, then it doesn't seem like it was worth the time. To my delight, his story was wonderful. It was interesting and funny, never making me drag myself through the story.

"All The Lies That Are My Life" was a story of friendship, a specific friendship, though. The strange friendship between two authors; Laurence (Larry) Bedloe and Kercher (Jimmy) Crowstairs. The story starts off with "They buried Jimmy Crowstairs today." Automatically, I thought the story was interesting. The writing sounded good, and the lines after the first sentence just draw you in. Larry goes on to tell us about the people present at the burial and a bit about Jimmy's past. He then tells a story about a time he went on an adventure with Jimmy. Then, the story comes to the really interesting part. Larry tells about the death of Jimmy, and the video of Jimmy reading his will is shown at the funeral. This is where the morals come in (as I think there are two things the author is trying to tell us about life in this story). The first thing about life the author was trying to portray is the idea that your closest friends will be the people you can trust the most sometimes. That by itself may not seem like something to know about life, but it is. It's not that one message by itself that really makes it a moral, it's the secrets about yourself or something that you may tell your best friends that really make it a life lesson.

The second moral appeared when Jimmy was shown reading his will/telling the people what they would each receive. The second to last person he had rewarded was his sister, Sylvia. She had been a terrible person to him when he was a child, and from there onwards, so he simply cut her out of his life for 12 years before he died. He gave his sister a nickname that Larry uses instead of saying 'Sylvia'.  The nickname was rude (but rather funny), so he didn't call her that, but the story is from Larry's perspective, so you hear it quite a bit in the story. Her nickname was one of the great and fabulous things in this story. The moral in that part of the story was that you should be kind to people, as being mean to them gets you nothing and often sets you in a bad place with that person/those people. An example of this from the story is,

"And the bottom line is that you get zip. Not a cent. Not a penny. Not a farthing. Not a grubnik. (Which is worth 13¢ American.) Not even a Blue Chip Stamp. Nothing is what you get. Nada, nyet, nihil, nil, nihilium! Nothing, because if I have any dislike of women as a species it comes from you. Nothing because if I haven't been able, my whole life, entirely to trust a woman, it's because of what you ran on me when I was a kid."