No person with a pen ever changed anything. No, I know what you’re thinking. Declarations of independence are useless without the ideas behind them and the ideas they foment and the men who take those ideas and run with them, shouting them, and rolling cannons behind them.

We have an entire history behind us; all histories that have been recorded give us the same story. Man has an idea, other men write down the idea, later men stratify the idea, add ideas, bind the ideas, and run shouting with them rolling cannons behind them. What I have placed here, as innocuously as I can, are stories, sometimes parables, told in the ways that I can, sometimes very well, sometimes very adequately, sometimes poorly. Sometimes I was drinking, sometimes I was tired, sometimes I had the urge to say something but lacked the motivation to think about it. A lot of writers do that. A lot of writers have something to say, but all writers want to say something.

All writers want to be read, and all writers want to know what the truth is. But a writer is a liar and a good writer knows that a good lie can be more truthful than the truth. You are not writers, so this probably sounds like nonsense to you. And though you have imprisoned me, you cannot imprison my ideas. See? That’s a lie. Because you’ve poisoned my ideas. You’ve stratified them, codified them, and told people what to do with their bodies, who they can love, who they can harm, who they are answerable to. And that has nothing to do with the truth.

The truth is not so dogmatic. Honesty has no place in your ideas. Your ideas are all about hiding and guilt and vengeance. Vengeance I understand. Guilt I understand, but only in the personal sense. And as for hiding, you’ve hidden me away, the author, and still you ascribe my name to your perversions. I should have seen that coming. I know our history, after all.

And I know this too: That for many years, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands, my name and what you’ve turned me into will foment ideas and send men shouting and marching and avenging and guilting because some guy some where some how is enough to go on without the motivation to think about what they’re doing. But one day, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of years later, people will adjust to what you’ve turned me into, I will become a background fixture in their history, and if they think of me at all they will doubt I’m worth the marching and the cannons and the guilt. I’m not. And anything I wrote, anything I believed, any lie or truth I ever told will fade.

I mean it, no man with a pen ever changed anything. What sort of a world would this be if we believed everything we read?