particularly obvious untruths frequently catch listeners flat-footed. the utterer can't possibly be lying, because such a lie would be trivially discoverable; so, i guess...their outlandish claim must be true? when your listeners are professionally credulous, you can build a lucrative career out of this type of lie. when they're high schoolers, you can generate some funny stories.

across the street from the berkeley high campus is a municipal "park" that's mostly just a big grass circle with a few scattered trees. officially named "Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park," or "Provo Park" if you're an old-timer, bhs students simply called it "the park." many of us ate lunch there, and each clique that did so regularly (like mine) had its own little staked-out patch. ours was adjacent to one of the smaller trees, under which we'd eat our sandwiches or 99-cent fried rice while we played "speed mafia," which is a variant of mafia in which all discussion is proscribed. this modification allowed the game to be played several times during a lunch period. it also rendered it - a social deduction game from which we explicitly excised all deduction - completely unintelligible. we considered this a great improvement.

our lunch spot, like all of the park, was visible from the north-facing windows of the school building across the street, the highest floor of which contained my trigonometry class. the official name of berkeley high's trig class was "math analysis," which interacted unfortunately with the nine-character course name limit on each student's dot matrix-printed schedule. each year, another cohort of students got to giggle at their matriculation in MATH ANAL.

one day, at the beginning of MATH ANAL, we found ourselves aimlessly milling around for a few minutes. the teacher was in the bathroom or something, i don't know. another student and i spent this time gazing out the window at the park across the street, chatting about who knows what. i don't remember why, but i found myself needing to geographically locate something in our field of view, so i described its location in relation to the tree that my friends at i sat near during lunch. the specific phrase i used was "our tree." my interlocuter, sam, responded with:

"well, it's not your tree."

and my instincts to be a little shit kicked in. i just ran with it.

"actually, yeah, it is ours."
"you can't own part of the park. it's a public park."
"you'd think so, but you actually can! the city has a program where you can buy little pieces of parks for your own use. it's not technically 'buying' - it's more of a long-term lease type of thing - but yeah, my friends and i put some money together, and it's ours."
"what...you really put money in just to have a place to eat lunch? how much money did that cost?"
"well, it's a pretty small section...i think the total was a little under a thousand dollars? but a bunch of us contributed."
"you paid a thousand dollars just to sit on some grass that you could have sat on for free? cody, you're an idiot!"

by this point, class was starting, and our we (and our conversation) had migrated back to our desks, accumulating some listeners along the way. one of them now chimed in:

"sam...who's the idiot here?"