The Truest Stories Are Lies

“Artists use lies to tell the truth.”
― Alan Moore

Some people doubt whether my last name is actually Glass. I inherited this — along with an artistic sensibility and a wrathful temper — from my father. For reasons unknown to me, “Glass” simply being… his name, was a bit too straightforward for people to believe. There were two stories about why he might have been called David Glass. The first was that he glassed someone in a bar fight. The second was that he ate glass for charity. Neither of those stories are true, but somewhere in between those paradoxical extremes lies a truth about my father. He had gotten into many bar fights. On one occasion just before walking into a pub with him, he stopped me outside the door and said “son, I’ve had three fights in this place and lost two of them. Right. Let’s go in.” I think I was eleven at the time. He also once ate worms for charity and ran other events for the same causes.