modern day folklore

There a million variations of the razor blade found in the apple that was given out by someone at Halloween story and I never get tired of hearing it. I just talked to a lady that says that when she was a kid, her family had an apple X-rayed and found one. X-rayed!! Not sliced open and then viewed? Nothing simple like that, her family, unsure of what to do, took the apple to the hospital and paid for an X-ray. What did they do after that? Nothing. She doesn't remember and no one was ever charged with that crime. Attempted murder, no charges filled. Can't even remember who did it. Did it happen again? She doesn't remember that either. So, the attempt at maiming one child with an apple (which children always eat when they get them for Halloween) failed and they never tried again. I guess razor blades are expensive or they felt that they were drawing too much heat.

Did the apple have to be X-rayed? She knew I knew she was lying and she left shortly after the conversation. I like that lady, I see her a lot in here, but I never thought she would be one of the afflicted. Those among us that believe that an urban legend actually happened to us. It's a pretty biting moment when someone sees you lying and you can't back out of it. You let one fly and they caught it. In the case of urban legends you really feel like shit, because you are so sure you're right, even though you are making it up.

There are an endless number of urban legends to choose from and with each new telling each legend grows stronger. The evil gets more menacing, the amount of money grows larger, or the amount of celebrity grows stronger. I first heard that Mikey from Life cereal fame, died from eating pop rocks and drinking soda together. Now, it's the little girl from some sitcom I have never heard of. Mikey, it turns out, was killed climbing a tree near a power line... Or was that the kid in that "don't climb trees near power lines" commercial? Either way, Mikey is dead, which must come as a shock to the real Mikey who lives in Connecticut. By the way, the girl from the sitcom killed herself and I'm pretty sure she didn't do it with pop rocks and soda pop.

The story about the man and woman who get stuck on some remote mountain road when their car breaks down is my favorite. If you haven't heard this one, I'm stunned that you didn't see it in the paper when it happened, it was all over the news. The story goes that a couple was driving into the mountains when the ran out of gas. It was getting dark and it was raining but the man decided to walk back down the road for fuel while the woman stayed behind and slept. At some point in the night, the woman began to hear a methodical tapping on the front windshield which she explained away as a branch from a tree being blown against the windshield by the high winds. In the morning she wakes up to find that the tapping was the man's foot, who has been impaled on a tree branch above the car. Oooooohhhhhhh.

Of course, it never happened, but I love the story. When I first heard it, I was very young and lived near mountains and I felt that it could have been a true story. I was afraid of the mountains for reasons that were similar to people being impaled on tree branches. So stories of dead couples sounded right. Things like that sounded plausible and I was being told this information by grown ups so it had to be true. Urban legends are born this way, and for some reason, everyone falls for them. Perhaps because we are impressionable as children and believe everything were told, even obvious bullshit. (how long did you buy the Santa Claus story?) And at no other time of the year will you hear more urban legends than right now during the apple encrusted razor blade season.

I want to create some new urban legends. I think we are due for some new juicy, scary stories that baffle us every time we hear it, like the scuba diver found dead in a tree after a forest fire, apparently sucked out of a lake by a plane that was using the lake water to fight the fire. We love that story and we believe it every time. We need more stories like that. We need a new one like a man found frozen in ice for a thousand years that came back to life and now lives in Georgia with a wife and two kids. We need some new ones to stir up our next generation of suckers. We can't be the last generation that is willing to believe this shit. We need to one up the last crowd for handing these ridiculous nuggets to us.

I am working on one that involves coffee, drug lords and a truck stop diner. "DON'T YOU REMEMBER???? That plane that was sneaking drugs across the border and it started to crash so the plane dumped all their drugs to decrease the weight. Well, the drugs were in these coffee bags and the bags landed near a truck stop and someone from the restaurant inside the truck stop thought they fell off the truck and decided to save money and use the coffee. The coffee killed ten people in the first five minutes. WE NEED MORE STORIES LIKE THIS, don't we?

We are all prone to believe the most outrageous story we hear. No one likes the simple, "it lived, it died" story. We need grand schemes and outrageous fortune. Hitler said it best, "the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it". And that worked for him like gangbusters. Urban legends are fantastic lies that we want to believe are true, like honest government and fair and balanced reporting. We want to believe in the reality of the most fantastical bullshit that we are willing to lie to ourselves and make believe that what we feel is genuine. No matter how many times someone tells me that the tapping foot story is a lie, I still believe it the next time I hear it. I am old enough to know better, but I love the passionate retelling of a story. The fixed face, the honest tone, the emphatic delivery - it must be true. No one could be so sure of themselves and be full of shit, could they? It could be that the next person that tells me the story is more fanatical or it's because the next person that tells me the story I have never heard lie before and so, therefore I believe them. Urban legends fall out of our mouths and expose us for the liars we really are. If you even try to retell an urban legend and you do it with a straight face, then you are showing those that you are telling how deep your lying potential really is. Now that is great stuff.