How I know.

So the other day I wrote my friend who has been out of work since the dick she was working for decided to give her the heave ho because she had a significantly family crisis and the clown figured why not pile on.

I was telling her how she had to be crazy to be in a rush to get back to work and be in an office once more.

Work itself is not so bad even when it's crazy but navigating the people in an office and all the various agendas can be draining.

People jockeying for position, there's a reason they call it the rat race and the environment over the last twenty years and the changes have only made it more vermin like.

So I was expressing my normal ennui and insecurity in all of it and I realized in that moment I must be feeling way, way better because I was complaining about truly stupid stuff.

It’s not as if it’s really important in the long run either. Work should be a means to an end. I don't measure my self worth from my job, not that I don't want to do a good job but I'm not a doctor or anything so it's not as if someone's life is on the line, I'm not an architect or a builder where I can look back and say I had a hand in building something.

About the closest thing I’ve come to in that regard was working on all the directional signage for the World Trade Center site. That's something which is small but I’m proud of my part in it.

Now I get to watch people lose their minds on an almost daily basis about a detergent package or a hand soap bottle.

It's hard not to laugh in their faces.

But seriously last weekend I wound up sleeping quite a bit and at one point I woke up and felt GOOD! It was something that hadn't happened in so very long and it was amazing, I had energy of only for a short while.

So now it's back to general malaise and ennui. Just a reminder to stay focused.

I remember when I started this. The person in question was someone who I had had a friendship with on and off for many years. I had invited her up to do some walking and to get out of her own orbit and she changed the dynamic and it didn’t happen and we wound up not talking for a few weeks until I got a phone call very late on a Sunday night (I believe) when she told me her spouse had been in a horrific car accident.

It was that kind of friendship in the sense we were close when she had a crisis but she was absent whenever I had a crisis. To say it was a bit one-sided would be understating it.

Her spouse was really likeable but at the same time he was someone you wouldn’t want to have your sister marry if that makes any sense because he really was in many ways a piss poor husband. Absent father, didn’t work, abused alcohol and drugs but he had a ‘brain injury’ that prevented him from working.

She bought into it though and I guess in their relationship that was what was important and anyone who challenged that status quo fell into the enemy camp.

Oddly enough about a year after all this happened we had a falling out. I can eat a certain amount of shit from people but then there comes a point where I’m a bit full and not inclined to have a second helping and she wanted to push some idiotic babble on me as an enlightened position as to why Italians had achieved a measure of success in American society where Blacks had not and it was so wrapped up into bullshit stereotypes I really wouldn’t have any of it.

So much for the enlightened among us... it’s okay to make a biased statement if our society allows it never mind the folks it’s a slur against. This was something a greater tapestry got thrown over and that was fine because really, enough was enough. You’d like to feel friendship is something of a two way street and while it is often not something truly in balance it isn’t totally one sided and in this instance it was.

The other thing I had dared was to indicate she might want to step away a little from the situation in regard to the spouse who as a result of the accident was in prolonged and slow decline. Medicine today is good for prolonging suffering and what this guy went through no matter what he was in life was a punishment of unimaginable proportions. People can sometimes say they are doing things out of love when in reality they are only prolonging pain and misery because they simply can’t let go.

That was the case here.

Anyway, I was okay with things and then I came across something online that she had written which was only adding salt to the wound as it were. That in combination of a total absence not too long after this even when I was in the process of dealing with my mother dying and shouldering everything alone cemented things as it were.

I unentangled myself from her on one of the few social networks I have active because something showed up in my feed and I thought to myself why am I still connected to this person? It’s not as if anything has changed or that things are going to be different and there will be some kind of coming together down the road and wouldn’t you know it but as soon as I did that, I heard from her even though I hadn’t heard nary a peep in two years.

Now, that was funny.

She forwarded something she had written which only showed she was still obsessed with the situation from her now deceased spouse. In light of the other thing she had written which I had stumbled upon I found it not funny but I’m struggling for a word to even describe it.... dishonest?

 

Realize, that the thing I had stumbled upon was so totally dismissive of me as a person, of my sensitivities regarding the slight and even more just overall the dynamic between us as to be astounding. It was such an incredible disconnect on her part because at one point in what she wrote she had spoken about it being such a mistake she had maintained contact through the years! Laughable, considering how many times she looked to me for support!

Anyway, I just forward back what she had written, the thing I found, back to her. She ignored it, didn’t own up to it. Didn’t acknowledge it. Didn’t say what she wrote really wasn’t true. She tried flattery but flattery isn’t worth much from a dishonest source so that was that.

Like I said, I’m an asshole and I’m sure I’ve done my fair share of hurting people in amazingly stupid fashion without even realizing that I created a deep wound but I would like to think I could own up to it, own up to my mistakes especially when someone is important to me.

That’s a lesson lost on a lot of people.