A moral conundrum.
I’m sitting alone right now, and this confuses me. It confuses me for at this very moment, I really wish I could be talking to someone. But not just talking for the sake of talking.
Right now, this instant, this second, this moment, I want to have one of those conversations that suddenly hit you like a satellite just fell out of fucking orbit and zeroed into its final resting place right on top of your unsuspecting head. The kind of conversation that you never prepare for, never truly understand, never can remember the essence of, until they come back to you. Until you have them with you, the words making their way through any place they need to go to get you back to where it was you were going in the first place. I don’t want small talk.
Know what I mean?
I’m going to assume that you do. But assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups, according to that classic of modern action cinema, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Yea, I saw that movie, and yea, I liked it. I’ll move on.
Sometimes you want people to talk to you. Sure, you want to talk to them as well, to slip your delightful baritone in between the breaks, but that’s just filler, window dressing. It’s an excuse to get them talking. I think that’s how it goes.
I want someone to talk to because a few things occurred today that I wish to talk about. And I want someone to say something back, to give me advice, or at least some semblance of an opinion. Something, anything, even nothing, as long as the words that it accompanied were pretty enough (self reflexivity is the nature of the post-modern. Or something.)
Someone who has an opinion that I respect insulted my friend today. And I’m ashamed because I didn’t know what to do.
If they had just been insulting me, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. People like to push my buttons all the time, because they think the fact that I get pissed about things that they find trivial is amusing, whereas I feel the very same way when they get worked up about other things. Either I get worked up or I don’t, hurrah, whatever. No, the troublesome thing that arose here was that the offender in question was doing nothing of the sort. He was complimenting me, complimenting my work.
But does that manner of praise become irrelevant while the thing that your dear friend has put their effort into is being cast aside as trash at the very same time? I don’t know.
I’ve always believed that one should stick up for their friends. I don’t see why you would bother calling them that unless you were willing to do whatever you could for them, whatever the case may be.
I’m wondering now if that has the power to cloud judgment. Am I standing there, being my own little fool on the planet, staring through a metaphysical fish tank to elevate my opinion of my friend’s end results?
I dunno. That’s kind of fucked up.
Know what I mean?