An odd thing happened last night. The results of someone's lie got someone sent a legal letter - the kindest way to put it would be that the letter was misinformed. The most accurate would be that it contained outright lies - lies which I found evidence of in my late father's records.

Why the lie? The answer, quite simply, is greed and the want to get something for nothing. It involved land and Trinidad and Tobago law - and it is in process at this point, so I can't write the details of it yet. Let it be said that a person is claiming that they accumulated rights through not paying rent on land in Trinidad and Tobago - a measly $52 TT a year - approximately $8.25 US/year per acre. Sounds pretty rough, doesn't it? But they did pay rent. I found the receipts in their file. Did they expect we weren't keeping records? I suppose that was it.

To top it all off, this is after I was talking to them about the price of purchasing the land. Suddenly, they decided to negotiate by falsehood. Convenient.

But still - to lie. A long time ago, a person now dead - my late Uncle Amar - taught me how important it was not to lie. That all a man has is his word of Honor and his Reputation to live by. There is some irony in the teacher and the student, but the fact remains that I learned it well and have been consistent throughout my life with others - and have even learned how not to lie to myself, the greatest sin of all. Granted, I'm not a saint but when I put my word behind something it has that weight. I see it as a bank of water with a small hole at the bottom with a faucet. When you lie, you open the faucet and the faucet breaks.

Thinking about all of this, I remembered my younger, wilder days and a little band called Metallica that my friend Robby got me deeply into at the time - enough so that I carried a card with the lyrics of To Live Is To Die on it:

When a Man Lies He Murders
Some Part of the World
These Are the Pale Deaths Which
Men Miscall Their Lives
All this I Cannot Bear
to Witness Any Longer
Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation
Take Me Home?

Silly thing to carry around in a jacket pocket where no one could see it, but there it was. I wonder where that old beat up smelly jacket went to.

I think I left it in Okinawa, actually... or was it Orlando?