Interesting that whenever we tell a story about something that happened in real life, we put our own spin on it. Especially if we are the focus on it. We make ourselves the hero, if we can, or the valiant in defeat when we must. Some more than others, but whom of us out there state the facts, just the facts? Does that even have any meaning? Facts are not just data — and even data is organized and specified — but the things we choose to encapsulate about a moment. We state something about an occurrence that matters to us or to the person(s) listening; there is no way around the subjectivity. It's like putting a pure stream of thought into words: some things get lost in the translation — and some additives are mandatory — when we chunk the data into word size portions.
The only thing we can do to rectify the situation is to get to know the person better who is telling the story. "Roger's take on the story," has meaning, for example, if we know Roger. It's an heuristic, a rule of thumb of sorts. And I think it works. I remember reading a biography of Philip K. Dick, and even the biographer got to know him well enough to know how he shaped stories about things that really happened to make them classic Dick interpretations. Perhaps this is a little mystery solved, that we get to know what really happened only when we get to know the one telling the story. Somehow, I think that figures — I think it was meant to be like that.
