A little meta-fiction

I thought I'd write up a story and put it in a bottle, and then maybe throw it in the ocean... or Lake Ontario... or maybe just a puddle somewhere. I hadn't gotten too far with the plot up to then. All I had was, 'story in a bottle.'

And I thought, 'Well, seeing as how I don't have a story yet I might as well get a bottle... of Jack Daniels.' Then being left in the predicament whereby I had a full bottle when what I needed was an empty one I did the only reasonable thing and got ossified, as any self-respecting artist would, until I found myself babbling away to the walls as though they were sentient beings.

Anyways... I almost had my empty bottle and was about to start in on the story to put inside when I started to get hungry. I figured that I'd best get something into my stomach to soak up all the booze. I thought about going to the corner store until I realized that I'd spent all my cash on the bottle I'd almost drained. I stumbled over to the kitchen to see what I could find in the way of food there... opened the fridge to find plenty of condiments but no food. 'Drat,' I thought, 'The curse of the single man!'

I got a spoon and had a few scoops of mayonnaise... then I had some mustard and some ranch. My insides started to turn and curdle. I checked in the freezer and found some hot dogs in an open package. I would have microwaved them if I owned a microwave, but as I didn't I just bit into one of them. It was like eating a Popsicle, except it didn't taste like sugar and fruit... it was more like a meatsicle... a crunchy crystalline bland substance mixing with Jack and mayo and mustard. 'The hell with this,' I thought.

I went back to my room and sat at my desk. In my drunken stupor I'd taken half of the uneaten sausage with me. I poked it into the empty bottle. 'Now there's a story for someone to try and figure out. If that washed up on your shore you wouldn't have the first clue how it'd all happened... how it came to be like that. But that's the beauty of a story... that sometimes it's the not knowing that makes for the twist in the tale... makes the imagination work.'

I thought about what it is to be a storyteller... thought how you can't trust people to tell their own tales and how everyone gives you a necessary fiction... like a defense mechanism against the unflattering things that we do and the way that we want others to see us instead of as we truly are. I thought about telling a story where fact was less important than fiction and then I wrote these lines... in the hopes that you'd know better than to believe a word I said.