Finished With Lies: Starting now, I'm telling the truth.

A They Might Be Giants deep cut about compulsive lying and a childhood memory about a dead rabbit, a paid psychic, and the slow realization that I was never the only one lying. (Mink Car, 2001)

“Is there something you want to tell me about Spot?” my mom asked as I stepped into the kitchen, closing the laundry room door behind me.

Spot was our bunny who lived in a suitable enclosure in the backyard. One of my after-school chores as a responsible fourth grader was to make sure Spot had food and water. Hearing a question start with “Is there something you want to tell me” sends my nervous system into overload. As soon as she asked me, I knew she knew.

I told her the truth.

“Spot died,” I said, as I felt my cheeks and ears begin to heat up. Tunnel vision forming. What I was not yet willing to give up was that -

it was all my fault.

Finished With Lies is the antepenultimate track on Mink Car. Compared to the previous track, it’s a bit stripped down; just the core band and their go-to instruments playing a very straightforward late-nineties pop-rock song. The patch on the keyboard has a very Mannheim Steamroller vibe to it. Despite its simple pop-forward sound, this song is an emotional memory labyrinth of epic proportions for me.

John Flansburgh has noted that the song started life as a slow, hypnotic march before the band eventually found their way to this more direct sound. I think about that a lot. A slow, hypnotic march is exactly what sustained dishonesty feels like from the inside. You don’t notice the tempo until you’re already somewhere you didn’t mean to be.

Telling the truth did not always come easy growing up. I did not have a healthy example set. I learned early that both lies and truth could be weaponized depending on what someone wanted from me, and often were. Eventually, I started lying to protect myself. Telling just enough of the truth so that my mom wouldn’t pry deeper. In any relationship where I didn’t feel emotionally safe, I handled things the same way. Not because I was covering up anything hurtful, but because I couldn’t trust that honesty wouldn’t be turned into ammunition later.

Quick crash course on my mom

She was, at one point, a paid psychic, and throughout my childhood made sure I understood that her abilities made lying not just wrong, but futile. The number of ways she used this to manipulate me is something I’m still unpacking in therapy. Each instance its own particular mind fuck. But the bunny situation was something else.

“Were you feeding Spot after school this week?” she asked.

“Yeah!” I replied without hesitation. At grade four, I knew to say it like you believe it. Sadly, I didn’t know it yet, but I was already cooked. She went on to tell me about a dream she’d had about the bunny feeling hungry, not knowing how to ask for help. A vision, a prompting from the spirits. Her way of letting me know the psychic pipeline was open and operational and pointed directly at me.

This was always the setup. The spirits had shown her something. Did I have anything I wanted to add?

Not telling the truth meant losing her trust. And losing her trust meant losing her affections. I would be cast out. We used to be friends, but now I’d have to earn my way back.

She told me about a second dream that week. She saw me going into the utility room to get the bunny food, then getting lost, forgetting to go outside. Wandering off to my room instead.

What I wasn’t telling her

The Monday of that week, a friend’s mom had bought him Super Mario Bros. 3. He wasn’t ready to play it yet, so he brought it to school and let me borrow it. After school each day, I’d go into the utility room, peek through the back door window, and if I could see food in the feeder from where I stood, I’d open the cabinet door and shut it. Open the back door, wait a moment, shut it. Then off to my bedroom to play Nintendo.

All the motions. All the sounds. None of the bunny. A perfect 4th grader scheme.

I confessed, was grounded specifically for not telling the truth the first time, and then had to write “I will always be honest” five hundred times on our chalkboard. Each sentence in a different color.

I will always be honest.

Later, as an adult, I came to understand that day for what it really was. My mom had watched from the dining room window as I performed my little after-school charade. She already knew the bunny had died; it’s not like she couldn’t have gone outside while I was at school. She had known all week. She watched her fourth-grade kid skip his chores to play a video game, day after day, and said nothing. Let it continue. Let the animal sit outside in the cold with a water bottle that was probably already freezing over because it was winter.

She let me neglect and kill a rabbit in order to catch me in a lie.

Not to protect the rabbit. Not to correct the behavior. To be right. To maintain the myth. To make sure I understood, at nine years old, that her reach was longer than my ability to hide things from her.

It’s in the bridge of this song where Linnell finally drops the pretense and lets the narrator’s actual strategy slip out:

I’ll turn everything around and confuse you

I’ll talk faster and faster ‘til I lose you

I’ll fix it so you can’t remember what was true

And there’ll be nothing to remind you

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Not the psychic dreams. Not the visions. Not the spirits with their helpful updates about the interior emotional lives of backyard rabbits. Just: I will move fast enough and loud enough and strange enough that you will stop trusting your own memory of what happened. You were the one who did something wrong. You’ll feel it. You just won’t be able to say exactly why.

My relationship with my mom, from that bunny until I went no-contact in my early twenties, was just layers and layers of various dead-bunny level stories. Different animals. Same cage. The details changed; the dreams, the visions, the things the spirits had told her, but the structure never did. She already knew. She had always already known. And I had always already lost.

The song eventually circles back, the way these things do: Now I’m finished with lies. Right. Sure. Starting now.

I believed it every time.

Did you ever have a moment as an adult where you looked back at a childhood memory and realized the architecture of it was completely different than you understood at the time?

You’re reading one of my Mink Car essays. An album full of pop, depression, car accidents, and high fidelity.

• See all Mink Car posts - Start Here

• Dive deeper into TMBG lore at TMBW.net (fan-run and fantastic)