[960] Function Over Form

I just built a little thing. It’s not pretty. I barely measured it. I didn’t take my time, snugly align the pieces, nor pretty it up in any way. On top of it now sits one of my, incredibly heavy, TVs. It doesn’t wobble, bend, or creak. It’s serving its purposes, which included giving me something “productive” to do, lifting my TV high enough to see better and allow for the space below to be freer, showing me just how bad I am likely to be at cutting angles I want slotted together, saving my overworked computer monitor stands, and giving me a chance to test the saw I wish to sell, but hadn’t put through any amount of wood-cutting. In the clean-up, I as well went after kitty litter and hair. It’s now serving as the inspiration for kicking off whatever comes of this writing.

I analogize often. The physical reality of my living environment really hammers it home. Function over form. I want the thing to work. I want it to serve its purpose even if it’s “weird,” or “wrong,” or “why did you do it like that?” When I can get something to work, the vague-enough “problem” I have snaps into focus in its resolution. Perhaps 12 things at once are now better, and I was only consciously able to list 6 of the most obvious.

I got sucked into looking through old friends’ pictures earlier. These social media sites won’t let anything die. When I consider those relationships in the context of function over form, they make a lot more sense. How many “close” bonds was I trying to form? Given that it’s many years later that it dawns on me to ask the question, probably not many. What did the group function as? Entertainment, companionship, laughs, fooling around, and help. I was just remarking about how I envisioned my space of the future being occupied by more than me and the cats, but do I want to fill it with people like the ones I rolled with in college?

Over time, I’ve insisted I make the extra mistake of being the one to reach out first. I’ve done this with dozens of friends. If I get a response at all, and it’s not openly hostile, it’s much later than in any timeframe that we could have organized a time to meet up, or it’s a kind of piddling, “Per the rumors and group disposition you weren’t informed of, I don’t know that I can really fuck with you,” kind of thing. I’m not complaining, this is the observation. Especially with time, that “thing” that you’re supposed to have in common with people you’re allegedly close to, becomes incredibly hard to define or recognize. It has me severely second-guessing the nature of comradery or connection altogether pretty habitually.

It’s not like it should be a surprise either. People fall out of deep and passionate love for partners who gave them children. You get old and sick or whatever mental health issue that’s gone unaddressed since childhood starts to take over. A lot of us only recently found out how Nazi Germany could really be a thing. Outside of the pathological unifiers in physiology, with each person being a world unto themselves, it really does seem like there is considerably more that divides us than unites us. I find myself struggling to connect some of my highest aspirations and ideals to the people who’ve supported me the most. What kind of hubris or naivety would make me believe an acquaintance, perhaps colloquially referred to as “friend,” is sharing in…me?

This is kind of coming to a head after some conversations with my buddy’s sister. On paper, her ex-husband literally checked boxes she had created for the type of guy she wanted. Well, he lied. He’s got some deep issues he’s not demonstrating a great capacity for proactively engaging or sounding remotely accountable towards. She’s divorced, he rarely sees the kid, and now my buddy and I’s experience at DCS is hopefully funneling through into a brilliant custody agreement. What was she supposed to do? She actually did the work and sought out who could fill in the blanks. It wasn’t gut. It wasn’t overwhelming limerence. But fooled by the lie, here we are, me, her, and her brother taking the child to the children’s museum this past weekend.

She was asking me what I wanted in a girl. Taking my initial answer as too vague, I described for her the things I wished I had in the relationships that weren’t there. Open and honest communication would be stellar. Someone who felt remotely secure and self-confident in who they were. Someone who could express gratitude for some of the million little things that go right each day. It’s not that my relationships were devoid of these, but they weren’t front and center. They were hinted at or thrown out like a desperate defensive shield when challenged.

That’s a lot of my friendships too. Hints, pictures, superficialities, but shit was always bubbling. There was always something left unsaid or that kind of befuddled condescending look Jake George would give like I didn’t understand the irony of something I said or have the lived experience to contribute. There was the on-paper story of number of parties attended, hours spent, outings enjoyed, shots toasted, and jokes told. But there was a lie at the center, and now I’m a single cat dad lol.

And that’s okay, but probably at least a little sad, no? Each person using the dynamic for their own function, be it the companionship, distraction, or stroking of their incensed ego boner. Some of the people still show up in each other’s pictures of course, years apart, all presumably living their best Insta-lives, gaining higher-order roles or taking further and more expensive trips. There are more than a few babies starting to float around. But is there a lie somewhere in the heart of it all? Or did it just reside in me and I managed just fine in cutting myself out and isolating my cancerous influence?

The operative, “If you meet an asshole once, they were probably an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you’re the asshole,” comes to mind. But I didn’t consider any of them assholes lol. I still don’t, incredibly shit rumors and posture towards me notwithstanding. That’s the thing. If anything, I got all romantic and very dream-like in what I envisioned the future would be. My first indication that I don’t need drugs to be fucking irrationally high. My strategy for combating irrational guilt kicks in. Whatever happened, is that what I wanted or intended? No. Fuck no. And the complicated ongoing self-discussion and examination or feelings associated maybe kinda sorta suggests that I actually gave a shit.

A lot of my clients have done incredibly shitty things, from killing people to…well killing people is pretty high up there, even if it was accidental. The seas of guilt and shame they swim in are crippling. Most often, they did whatever they did while high or drunk, or really really high and/or drunk. The locus of their betrayal and irrational disregard of consequences in service to their hijacked survival mechanisms can readily be blamed on their addiction, conveniently or otherwise believed. What’s any one of our excuses for being a bad friend or betraying a budding notion of family? Are we just heedlessly trudging along with our general conditioning and abuses ever ambivalent?

What do you want in a friend? Them just to be there regardless of the tangible impact on your life? What do you want in a partner? Someone pretty enough to not fuck up your child’s looks and irrationally committed enough to their job to ensure you’ll garner child support no matter what? My buddy’s sister suggested that in my initial vague answers that I hadn’t thought hard enough about what my standards were. My standard is at once so incredibly low, but seemingly impossible to locate. I want someone that functions lol. I’ve relaxed my ideas about looks somewhat. I don’t require someone to know me inside and out and go Dutch on every meal. I don’t need you to be “passionate” about anything, from politics to the environment. I just want to trust that you’re going to function as a decent trying-to-be-better you. But like, who the fuck are you? Are you building little things to testify to an approximation of you like me? Are you working on something that means anything to you?

That’s how I tricked myself with Allie. She’s an incredibly hard worker. That passes an instinctual vibe check well before icing on a cake regularly glazed. (That was subtle, right?) Open and honest communication? Well, maybe, here and there, but when I pull the emails, the thing that blew up a year later was a thing that wasn’t worked on or fixed in month, if not week, one. I can trust that there’s a 100’ x 100’ garden outside. I can’t trust she has a handle on when she tells me she’s going to work on something emotionally or practically helpful conversationally. Oops.

What about with Kristen? Talk about my rose-colored glasses there. I don’t blame her for the things she struggled with, and I certainly had less of the tools or language than I do now to perhaps better approach those things, but the number of things left unsaid over the course of 5 years was vast. The nature of her “experiment” with me was not introduced into the conversation until years after we split lol. Steev before her had similar mental health struggles and we were so cavalier or evolved as to have literally planned our break-up date. I can’t say I have a strong sense of what was going on with that dynamic.

Again, what do I want? I want someone more interested in the work that functions more than the form their story takes. I don’t need a wedding let alone the photos. I don’t need a deep bench of pretty-enough posturing about the sacredness of the pageantry. I don’t need to be told constantly how good I look or special I am or resented when I have more on my mind than desperately searching for when I can work in those affirmations for you. I just want to be recognized. I’d like for the incredible amount of time I’ve spent and work I’ve done and reflection I’ve engaged in to register as something worth sticking to. I don’t want to feel like I’m perpetually failing to live up to the arbitrary dictates of ill-considered lies.

I just want a friend.