Lawrence, Kansas was shocked to its roots on Monday by rumors that the musician and former Tumblr user Taylor Swift had decided to eat lunch. Crowds gathered en masse around Free State Brewery downtown, where she was rumored to be enjoying the popular mid-day meal. It all makes sense – We know she’s been to Lawrence before, she was caught by TV cameras observing the Chicago Bears in Kansas City on Sunday, we know that she loves a nice cool Copperhead Pale Ale on an early autumn afternoon, and we know that she’s had DVD copies of La Haine, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and Ernest Goes to Jail on hold at the Liberty Hall video store adjacent to Free State Brewery for the past six years. All signs pointed to the rumors of Swift’s meal being a reality, but reporting from the Lawrence Journal-World revealed them to be merely fantasy.

Similarly, the rumors that Taylor Swift soundly defeated me in tetherball in embarrassing fashion early Monday afternoon are also untrue. I know that the timeline makes sense, the locations of both parties line up, and that there is ample photographic, videographic, auditory, and forensic evidence indicating that Swift (34) indeed humiliated me (28) in tetherball (final scoreline 21-2) at Lawrence’s Lyons Park on Monday, but JoeBush.net is officially reporting that to be only a rumor, a falsehood based purely off of hearsay and conjecture. The rumors that Swift went on two separate 10+ point runs are unsubstantiated. The rumors that I was visibly tearing up and gritting my teeth by the sixth round (down 6-0), actively crying by the thirteenth (down 12-1), and had undergone a ‘fury vomit’ by the nineteenth (down 18-1) are pure speculation, and though the samples of the splatter left on the court by that discharge does match my own genetic profile, you cannot use that as evidence that this took place as I’ve expulsed myself on that tetherball court hundreds of times before and I will continue to do so until I am no longer allowed there — the blood splatter sample alleged to be from me losing control of myself when I threw my entire body into what I was alleged to have referred to as a “Falcon Punch” that I missed badly, leading my body to careen to the ground and my elbow and much of my forearm to get skinned on the tarmac, though it also matches my DNA, could be from any number of visceral tetherball mishaps I’ve had in the past at that park.

The rumors that Swift offered to ‘go easy on [me]’ and ‘enact the double-digit skunk rule’ in a show of genuine grace rarely shown to me by the tetherball-players of Lawrence and I responded with ‘I will never, never, never give up, not to an out-of-towner like you, this… is…’ and then I clenched one of my hands into a fist and looked up like Goku does in Dragonball Z ‘for Lawrence!!!’ and then got on my knees and prayed loudly to each of the Star Spirits from Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 individually for guidance and strength, followed by similar prayers to similar entities before every round to follow, first from each of the subsequent Paper Mario games – the first of my two points from that point on coming after I prayed to Kerstia from Paper Mario: Sticker Star – and then from other assorted fictional and non-fictional figures of video games, literature, cinema, folklore, and the NFL Network – the second of my two points coming after I prayed to Jason McCourty – are also simply incorrect falsehoods about the actual events of Monday afternoon.

I was not even there at Lyons Park on Monday afternoon, though I will admit that my first attempted alibi indicating that I was at the Applebee’s on 6th street enjoying a Quesadilla Burger and a Flaming Dr. Pepper was proven false both by CCTV footage and the fact that the Applebee’s on 6th street closed something like five years ago, and I have, at time of writing on Tuesday afternoon, yet to think of another alibi. She, however, absolutely, was not there, because she’s a big-time famous musician and has no time to beat plebians like me at tetherball, and she doesn’t do this at other assorted mid-sized college towns across American on a routine basis. That is an incorrect belief to hold — potentially one to be blamed on the infamous Mancala Effect that everyone has when they misunderstand something — among a series incorrect beliefs at the core of the horrible defacing rumor spread about me losing in absolutely abhorrent, pathetic fashion in tetherball to popular music idol Taylor Swift on Monday afternoon.