Pink Elephants. A memory.

" I was reading something the other day, and they found an actual pink elephant!"

"No they didn't!"

"Yes they did! I read it in a magazine!"

"Which one?"

"Cosmo!"

I was clearly lying, but I was ten years old. So it was okay. I don't think that counts as a white lie, or a bad lie. Simply, a stupid lie. Serving no purpose, other than an exploration of the boundaries of what you can get away with in conversation.

I'm better at it now. But still, that kid had to go home and ask his mom if she read that there was a pink elephant is Cosmopolitan Magazine. That must have been a great talk for his mom.

"Mom, is it true they found a pink elephant?"

"No, who told you that honey? Pink elephants don't exist."

"A kid a school said he read it in Cosmo."

"They don't write about pink elephants in Cosmo honey."

"Oh, okay... Mom?"

"Yes?"

"What do they write about in Cosmo?"

Ha! I'm picturing the look on her face. Amazing.

I guess now you know what kind of kid I was. I miss those kinds of lies. The lies of adulthood tend to be so serious and believable.

Hard to navigate sometimes. You know?

I read somewhere recently that somebody hacked into a news network and reported a couple of explosions at the White House, where the President lives. It actually affected the stock market for the day.

The thing that I don't understand about it is; if you have the power to hack into a news network and report fake news. Why choose something something so horrible? I get that you're probably a special kind of asshole that probably has issues beyond my own understanding. But imagine the mass hysteria if CNN had reported the discovery of a pink elephant.

That probably would have stock market too.