You know, I like the idea of picking
someone. I hate marriage, and I barely grasp what it is most people
try to sell me is their relationship. But to me, picking someone has
little to do with either of you, and everything to do with intention.
Intention is what matters. When you give a shit is when you see shit
manifest.
Like, even if she's not happy about it or ditches my ass down the line, I've picked Kristen (okay she picked me first). Like, you either do or don't know our dynamic and it really doesn't concern me to detail it, but if she decides to kick my ass down the curb later, I'll have been ever goddamn lucky to have even known her. She needs lunch dropped off, duh, I'm your man type shit. Date to the prom? Don't look to the stars because I'm already there.
I think that when it comes to having good parents, in an obviously non romantic kind of way, this is how you “should” feel towards your kids. Yes, even if you don't. You fucked, they're yours, grow the fuck up. I know what it is to have someone at my back, I think you're insanely lucky to have one, let alone more than one person there for you. I never understand parents who find it in themselves to burden their kids with issues they clearly don't even want to resolve. Adjust your fucking focus and be amazed at what falls in line.
I think this is how we should all kind of feel, kind of desperately, about all the people in our lives. I think initially this sounds a tad dramatic. I also think you don't begin to understand the word “appreciate” until you give people special status.
I wish I understood the heart of it, but I don't think I deserve my friends. Part of being “Nick P.” is having learned long ago what it is to feel by yourself and figuring things out that, at the very least, make sense to you. My friends are nice. My friends care. My friends, when they're sarcastic or dicks are still not “mother fucked the fuck up” when it comes to relating to life or other people. I understand there are plenty of solipsistic depressed people who feel the world will never understand them. This is not what I'm after.
My problem comes from understanding. Maybe you've been around when the guys in our group beat our chests and talk about what would happen in a fight scenario. We list our weights and heights and what we may have encountered in the past. To me, none of it really has ever spoken to the point. I would love to beat the ever loving shit out of someone. I would love to scare the people around me. I would bask in the glory of making a moment be one you never forgot about how you should never fuck with a person capable of doing such things. I'm not a tough guy. I'm not a brawler. I just get unduly excited about the opportunity to hurt someone in a way that sends a real message, albeit “justifiably.”
This is one of those aspects of my personality I contend with when I think about the nature of my friendships. I know I went to school with, and rolled with, the type people quite prepared to stab a mother fucker in a dire situation. I'm still not quite convinced it's the same thing.
But enough about my fantasies. Let's talk more about the people who consider me utterly retarded in regarding them in such high esteem.
It's a relative trend for my friends to experience any number of pretty fucked up conditions. I'd need more than one hand to count the number who've been raped or sexually abused. “Fill-in-the-blank” disorder spans across a few boards. Whether people need medication or therapy or are still in need of medication and therapy...I seemingly have a habit of finding people not like me.
And it's fucked because I wish they felt about themselves like I do about them. And they can't. Or if they do, it takes years and years of therapy. Like, I consider myself a particular kind of fucked up, that's fine. I don't want to kill myself. I haven't been fucked with by some adult when I was a kid. I don't want to puke or cut or really anything that would inhibit my general enjoyment of the generally shit circumstances we've been given. And how I may give a shit does nothing to override or contextualize where we're at now. It's stuck. It's stuck-ly selfish. I have no idea how to change it.
Or maybe I do.
When you pick. When you give yourself a chance to give a fuck about one other person, that's half the battle, just by sheer fact of population numbers. You only need half of all people to decide there's one person they're going to go out on a limb for. For arguments sake, everyone you could ever give a shit about, you'd theoretically go to the ends of the earth for. Let's forgo the idea we're buddy buddy Nazis in this thought experiment. Maybe you're huddled in a bunker or managed to be the last few people on the planet. But good people are good people, and circumstance provided you an opportunity and the path tends to look pretty clear.
And I think it's much about those “unsaid” rules. Like, no one has to sit me down and tell me to bring Kristen lunch. Even when she's pissed off at me or says not to come, she's wrong and I'm bringing her food. That's all you need, very regardless of a label. That's not marriage. That's not mutual fears of loneliness. That's wanting to feed someone you give a shit about.
Because all I have are my actions and time, I hold them in the highest regard. I may lead with “I'm bored” but it's way more “I want to be around you verses something else.” I hate to believe it about myself, but I know how to not know anybody. I'm not afraid of disappearing. I know to make “friends” if I need them. I know how to play along. My most meager friendship will speak more to the potential and future I see than any empty professions of “tell me how you've been” between the times we've seen each other. And this is only because I see you as quite independent and “legit as fuck” regardless of whether or not I check the fuck in on you.
So yeah, I don't deserve you and am always looking for the moment it all goes to shit and we stop being cool. It's not you, it's me. At least you got another glimmer of my perspective before we maybe never talk again.
