Thoughts on Curt Lies

Curt Lies

My last name is often misspelled. People want to put another s in it as in Isles. Like the Islands.

Sometimes they want to insert a double ss at the end. The worst troublemaker is that a capital I and lowercase l look identical on a laptop.  No one wants to be known as Curt Ills.

But I can beat that. A large organization has listed me as Curt Lies.  

I imagine I’ll be stuck with that moniker for the rest of my life. It’s impossible to get off a huge database.

Curt Lies.  

I’ve been thinking about lying and truthfulness. One of my life goals is to be a truthful man.  If you make up your mind ahead of time, to tell the truth, you probably won’t lie.

I believe the current worst liar in America is a US Congressman from New York named George Santos.

Since his election, Rep. Santos’ resume has collapsed in a tangled jumble of lies and fabrications.  The worst is “that his mother was in the South Tower on 9/11.”  She was in Brazil.

The thing that amazes me is that if you worked at Burger King or Precision Tune and lied like that, they’d fire your butt that same day. Not so with a US Congressman.

George Santos has explained his many transgressions as “embellishments” and “misstatements.”

Where I come from, he’d be called a bald-faced liar.

Like most liars, I bet there’s a long pattern of lying in his life. You don’t become that bad of a liar overnight.  

I don’t know if he’s a pathological, serial, or habitual liar. I’ll leave that to the experts.

But I have one final rural adage that applies to folks like him: “He’d rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stay on the ground and tell the truth.”

Here are some reminders to self:

1. Lying and truthfulness are both habits. Work hard to develop truthfulness. 
2. If you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said.
3. If you don’t tell the truth, it will eventually come back to bite you in the behind.

I could sign off in several ways, but I’ll keep it simple.

Curt Iles

That’s a capital I with a lowercase l.

Postscript: People have nearly the same trouble with my first name. It’s pretty short: Curt.

Here’s how it goes:

“Sir, is that with a C or K?”

“Is it Kirk or Curt?*”

“Is it Karl with a C or a K?”

I now approach fast food restaurants counters in this way:

“Sir, what name do you want your order under?

“Bob.”

No one asks me to pronounce it or spell it or repeat it.  It’s just Bob. My grandchildren get tickled when “Bob” orders.

*One last tidbit. I was married to my sweet wife DeDe for over twenty years before my father-in-law stopped calling me “Kirk.”