I’d like to welcome Mike–an aspiring comedy writer that I met in the Chicago area. He penned a piece for Freelance-Zone readers that we are going to share with you here today…enjoy!    -Catherine

“Only when you accept that it is fake can you know that it is real.”

In a world immersed in reality TV, I find myself a cynic. And maybe 23 is too young to declare myself a cynic, but here I stand: cynical.

Is cynical the right word? Skeptical? What’s the right word for someone who thinks everyone is full of it? Irish Catholic? Yeah, we’ll go with that.

Perhaps it’s because I surrounded my high school self with the most dramatic of high school groups–drama club. Or maybe it’s because I’m so over reality TV as of Real World: San Diego. Whatever the reason, I have a hard time trusting people. Can you blame me?

People are performers at heart, driven by motive. When we want things from someone we naturally do what we can do to get it. Guys feign interest in a girl’s story when trying to score at a bar. Babies! Babies know they can get their bottle if they just cry a little. It’s friggin’ primal, man! It’s hard to cut through the superficial surface of a person to get to their pure, true feelings. How can you know if you’re getting the real deal?

If they are not real.

As a reader/writer I love fiction. It’s pure. It’s whole. If it is written then it is so. The author is “God”. A non-fiction writer, on the other hand, has to struggle to gather as many facts as they can. Then they tell the story as they have come to understand it. A fiction writer’s perception of the world they create is infallible. They are omnipotent. When the author tells me his protagonist, a struggling single mother who works two jobs just to feed her kids whom she doesn’t have time to see, is in love with the millionaire, I know she is in love. I don’t suspect she’s a gold digger. I know she’s genuinely in love. And what a lucky twist of fate that her soul mate is rich.

You know what I would say if I met a modern day Romeo and Juliet? ‘Seriously? Get over yourselves. You’re a bunch of stupid kids who don’t know a thing about love. Juliet, you just want to tick off Daddy–and Romeo, you can’t stop looking at her chest!’ Honestly, there is no way I would buy that story if it were real. But because Shakespeare wrote about them to entertain us, I totally believe in their love and my cynicism -err- Irish Catholicism can be curbed while I read about those love birds.

Maybe one day I’ll write an autobiography. And I’ll list it as fiction. That way when you read it and I tell you about the annoying, melodramatic joy suckers I surround myself with, you won’t question that it’s the truth.

I bet you’d buy into it.

BIO: Hey, I’m Mike. I’m an aspiring writer/comedian living in Chicago. I moved here from Philly to pursue my dreams and to show Cubs fans what it is like to be a fan of a winning team. I like to write sketch comedy mostly, and right now I’m trying to take on the art of TV pilot writing.

You can follow me on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/themikekidd