It looks like one of my favorite holidays, National Honesty Day, is close approaching. No, to be honest it’s not a favorite holiday but still a pretty cool concept. I’m sometimes struck by all those hundreds of white lies that we all tell through the course of the day, such as “How are you?” “Oh, I’m fine,” when I’d really like to cry or scream real loud.

Then there’s all the sexual lies and withholding that come with being a transvestite and a bondage fetishist. The crappy thing about being sexually different is that it teaches you to lie from such an early age and it becomes such second nature. I find even now that most everyone in my life knows that I’m a TV, I’ll still keep things secret that I don’t even have to anymore. It just comes so easily.

Or those times when someone asks a perfectly innocuous question, like I’ll be at a club and someone asks, “How long have you been coming here.” And for some unknown reason I’ll have this impulse that saying the truth, (say, two years), is somehow dangerous, and without even knowing why I’ll find myself myself saying, “Oh, about eight month.” Why did I even do that? It doesn’t even matter, but I lie and don’t know why I’m doing it.

So honesty is sometimes on my mind, though I fall short all the time. But maybe April 30th will be a good day to practice. Self help guy Brad Blanton, who wrote the Radical Honesty books, makes the nice point that in the short run honesty often does make things worse – more difficult and complicated – but in the long run it makes things easier. It allows you to deal with reality and the “way things are.” A tough philosophy to pull off.