Love, The Kind You Clean Up With a Mop and Bucket

Everybody who is anybody knows that Myspace is so 2005.  Facebook is probably the very late now and Twitter or something like that will be the future.  But whatever.  I don’t care about the future.  In fact, I barely care about the present.  I’ve conceded the present to an uncertain and unguaranteed future and so all I’m left with is the past.  And the past may be through with me, but I surely am not through with past.

I had a dream last night that made me think of an old friend.  It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve been in touch with this particular friend and part of me thinks that when you haven’t spoken with someone for ten years it is hard to keep calling them a “friend”.  In fact, I have a suspicion that he might prefer I didn’t refer to him as such.  Our lack of communication hasn’t been for a lack of effort on my part, but it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.  The last time I asked someone who might know what he was up to I was told with a scowl, “I don’t know, probably smoking weed somewhere in Littlestown.”  Well, then.  That was three years ago.

The truth is, this guy was kinda hard to be friends with.  I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way (see the end of the last paragraph).  I was there with him through a lot.  There were a lot of people who were there with him through a lot more.  But he was by himself for WAY more than anyone could know about.  My old friend had a lot of issues.  Demons, he liked to call them.  And maybe they were.  Those are the kinds of words you use when you are raised in church.  Once, in a rare moment of vulnerability, I asked him why he couldn’t just let some of those things go.  It was a stupid question, but I was young when I asked it.  He was young when he answered it, but he told me something that made him seem old.  He told me that he likes his life better with his demons.  That he can’t image his life without them.  Ten years later I have no idea what has become of him, but I know this:  I don’t think you can blame people for their prisons.

Undeterred by my experience and spurred on by my dream, I decided to go hunting for my former friend in the only place I know where to find relics from my past: Myspace.  And some relics I did find.  I hardly use my myspace account anymore because like I said, it’s just so 2005.  But it is way easier to snoop and stalk people on myspace than say, facebook.  So I went looking through my friends list for people that might have some sort of a “friend of a friend” connection.  Nothing.  I searched a little deeper, thought of everything I could think of, still nothing.  I guess it doesn’t really surprise me that he doesn’t have a myspace, or at least one that I could find.  What did surprise me was everyone else I know who does.

It turns out that 90% of the people that I know are either married or have kids or both.  But not necessarily in that order.  And in a possibly but not certainly related story, most people I know look like shit.  I mean, they’re smiling and everything, but still.  Most people I know are fat and happy and have busted faces displaying thier families on myspace.  And good for them, I guess.  I just find I can’t relate.

I suppose that it is easy to make the argument that I am a lazy pathetic loser who never meets anyone because I refuse to leave the house and I don’t have any offspring because I don’t have nearly enough sex.  You’d get no rebuttal from me on that.  But something about this “settling down”, this having a family, a real job, a 401k, buying a house, it just seems so…so…foreign.  I just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility for me.  Like it doesn’t even show up on the radar.  I don’t really understand why.  I suspect that it has something to do with the adversarial relationship I have with happiness.

You know, I gave it a shot, the whole happiness thing.  It’s not a secret to those that know me that last year was not really a good year for me (odd numbered years rarely are).  But something strange happened almost as soon as the calendar changed.  I started to feel…different.  I started sleeping.  I got motivated.  I started the novel I always wanted to write.  I don’t know if that is what you call happiness, but it was definitely something.

But recently, a different old friend showed up.  He usually resides in the pit of my stomach and gets his excercise circling my brain.  You know, as bad as it feels it kinda feels good.  Like things are back to normal.  Like I’m right about the way the world works.  But the funny thing is that I know I’m wrong.  It doesn’t change anything.  And it made me think of my decade-lost friend and what he said about his demons.  I finally understand what he meant.  I’d like to say that we all have our prisons, but I don’t think everybody does.  I believe people now when I read the cliches they put on thier myspace page.  I doesn’t make me angry or jealous, it just makes me feel like I’m reading Japanese.  But inside my prison the temperature is perfect.  I have the baseball package on TV and wireless internet.  I write that stupid fucking novel when the writing’s good and other times I just play video games.  Everything is comfortable here, even the fact that I am relentlessly unhappy.