The Magical, Expanding Timeline!

Another thing I should've noticed about Clark right off the bat was that the timeline of his stories just didn't fit. He was of course an "expert" in his field,and he'd been renowned in said field. He'd had all sorts of awesome jobs, positions that neither made sense given his qualifications nor given his age. Since high school, he'd been on broadway (only later, when I compared notes with others who had been "friends" with him, I found out which show he claimed he'd done changed several times.), been a model, starred in stage shows at a theme park (I do believe he worked there, but I think the lie was in the role he "gave" himself in these stories), studied abroad in France for a semester (and was fluent in French), been on a trip to Afghanistan ( I later found out it was Iraq in some peoples' versions). Technically, from what I know, he only left town for about two years, and it seems almost impossible that all of these things could have happened in that time. Not to mention, Google is an incredible tool, and let's just say there is no record of him anywhere near any of these things.

Of course, I can't check the records of the France story, but I will say this...after I started to find out his lies, I recalled an incident where we met up with a friend of mine who was fluent in French. I raved to her about how Clark was, too...they could talk to each other! I remember her talking to him and the look of panic on his face. He just stared at her, his face turning red. I now attribute that to exactly what it was: he didn't understand a word she was saying, because he wasn't fluent in French at all.

This is one thing that still bugs me in regards to his snowing people to this day, because he uses these "professional acting credits" on his resume to land jobs and the respect of people around him, which is one reason so many people are quick to drink in his flattery. After all, who doesn't want to hear a professional actor tell them how great they are in an amateur theatre?

I wonder sometimes how I was dumb enough to believe it, too. After all, if he was a professional actor, why the heck was he busy doing community theatre productions? Why were there no playbills or pictures from his time in New York as a model or on the road on his tour?

But he was also very good at lending crediblity to his stories in such a way that you never heard the attesting to from someone else, but you believed it came from someone else just the same. Example: he once told me how some of his students (whom I knew) had "looked up his pictures online," and how embarrassing that was. I never saw them, I never asked the students about them. But someone, just that little tidbit was enough that it made you believe it. It's a phenomenon I can't exactly explain. It was as if he was able to have someone else corroborate his story when in actuality, it was just him lying to corroborate it using their names. Some of the tactics are so simple it's hard to believe they work!

I guess it goes back to the whole thing about how, if you're close to someone, you don't have a reason to doubt them. After all, 96% of the population aren't sociopaths. Unfortunately, I'd befriended one of the 4% that is.