i'll be your ghoulish loving guy
we'll lurk beneath the bright orange moon
soaring across the blackest sky
and when we reach the last dark street
we'll hurry home so very quick
and you can offer me a treat
or better still a mmm-mmm trick
What are you doing here?
Lucy Sky Diamond was nothing like the girl I met at The Pink Flamingo Hotel just a few months ago. Her long, black hair was cut in a bob and dyed a silvery blonde. She wore tinted glasses over her bright eyes, and she appeared to have lost a good twenty pounds, her perfect body seemingly wasting away to nothing.
I'll admit I was a bit startled, but clearly not as startled as she was.
"Lucy," I began, "everyone is looking for you."
She grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me into her apartment from the creaky hallway, then quickly closed and locked the door behind me.
"Are you crazy?" she hissed. "Are you out of your ever-loving mind?"
"I was worried," I offered by way of explanation.
"Worried? You were worried? Good God, now ... oh hell, now ... yes, now you should be worried."
"Lucy," I said as tenderly as I could manage, "I love you."
Suddenly, her stern look began to soften. She sat down on a small divan, put her hands to her face, and began to cry. I stood there sheepishly, waiting ... waiting for what? I had no idea. This was new territory for me.
"No," she moaned. "You can't love me. You simply can't."
"I do love you," I repeated, "I love you with all my heart."
She looked up at me tenderly. She seemed so fragile, and I had the sense that at any minute, she would completely fall apart.
"No one knows I'm here," I offered, "together, we can work this out, move away, find a safe haven."
Her sobs turned to spits of anger, and she snapped at me, "Of course someone knows. She knows. And wherever we go, she'll know."
"Who?"
"Who?" she echoed. "You don't know who? Are you an imbecile?"
"Do you mean Holly?"
"Yes, Holly. Don't you get it? I never murdered that hapless trucker. Sure the guy was pushing the limits, but I was fine. Doing business, when who shows up? Holly. It was Holly who killed him, not me."
"Holly? Why would Holly kill the guy?"
"Why? Who knows why? She's a sociopath, crazy as a loon. She sees herself in her girls, and she hates what we do. That guy ... that poor guy wasn't the first, and he won't be the last."
My head was swimming. I looked around the room, found a chair, and sat down. I wondered if I was going to pass out.
"But I was there, you see," Lucy continued. "I was there and watched her stab that poor sap until he stopped breathing. Blood, God Almighty, there was blood everywhere. I thought I was next, so I bolted out the passenger door and hightailed it around the back of the hotel. I wanted to disappear, wanted to become invisible. I didn't want you to be involved, but I had nowhere else to go, so I crawled through your window."
For a moment, I didn't know what to say. Then a thought dawned on me, so I asked quietly, "Does Holly know where you are?"
Lucy looked at me with an expression of disbelief. "Of course, she does," she blurted. "It was Holly who got me away from The Pink Flamingo, letting the blame for the murder fall on my shoulders, and put me up here."
"I'm sorry. I had no idea," I mumbled.
"Too late now. Too late for sorry. Now that you know, she'll be coming after me. Don't you see? She has connections all over the state. She makes one phone call, and I'm as good as dead."
"No you're not," I snapped. "I'm getting you out of here. Pack a bag, we're leaving."
"It's too late," Lucy moaned. "We're both loose ends. You're just as dead as me."
"Nobody's dying," I insisted, "pack a bag, we're leaving."
“In my honest opinion ...”
"Just my opinion, of course ..."
"I'm entitled to my opinion ..."
" I am of the opinion that ..."
"It goes without saying that ..."
We've all heard expressions like these. When discussing some matter relevant to how we feel about a subject, we express an opinion.
Most people think that their opinion is unimpeachable. After all, it is what someone believes, usually without any reservation or second thought.
What most people don't seem to realise is that their opinions might be wrong.
Wrong? How can the way one feels be wrong?
Well, let's take an extreme example. Hitler was of the opinion that Jews were the bane of human existence and decided the only solution was to eradicate the Jewish race. Every morning, when he crawled out of bed, he probably didn't think that his opinion was wrong. In fact, I'm guessing he thought he was perfectly right in his beliefs. He really saw himself, as strange as this may seem, as doing "good."
Common sense tells us that Hitler's determination to commit genocide was wrong. The question is: Why didn't Hitler see what we see?
The answer is simple enough. Hitler, like so many evil-doers in our world, was a master of self-deception.
None of us, hopefully, are like Hitler. However, many of us exhibit the same self-deception by forming an opinion and "locking it in" as if it were some kind of irrefutable truth. We never even entertain the notion that our opinion(s) might be wrong. In the course of growing up, we are so bombarded by the notion that we must be "true to ourselves." As a result, we typically refuse to entertain self-doubt. Instead, we stand fast in the belief that whatever it is we "feel" must be absolutely right.
If any of us seriously wants to be "correct" about some important matter, then we must allow for some doubt, some self-examination of what we espouse to be true. Questioning our beliefs is not a sign of weakness. Rather, it is a sign that we are able to grow and change as individuals. Anyone who maintains that he or she has "strong" opinions and who will not waiver from that opinion is simply reasserting his or her "right" to have his or her opinion. Put another way, he or she is simply affirming his or her "right" to be wrong.
Too often, people will use this "appeal to opinion" as a building block in an argument to convince you that they "know better" with regards to some important matter. For example, no one can stop a person from saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven. Everyone has the "right" to express a belief, but just because you can state a belief doesn't make your belief "right."
After all, there are facts, and there is bullshit. People who form opinions based on facts have something to offer any conversation. People who simply live and think by the seat of their pants have only cow pies cooked up in the short-order kitchens of their simplistic, inflexible minds.
Just my opinion, of course ...
Dogs — they get away with everything the rest of us don't.
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