The social scene at a calmer brain state is much more comfortable, but it’s also clear that my experience have been neither a mirage nor just “my problem”. Greeting someone and not being acknowledged, or trying without success to join a conversation, those aren’t subtle cues. That weird sensation of being in a group who pretended that I was not there was not an illusion. Now that I have a better assessment and some independent confirmation, I know I’m not crazy anyway.
I had a romantic idea of what friendship was, which is no more realistic than romantic ideas about sex. That’s especially true in a group that gathers in a neutral spot to share intentionally superficial good times. Even setting aside the explicit rejection and demotion lately, it’s clear I’ve made some ten-year mistakes and attributed importance to friendships that was entirely mine and not shared.
Discovering that I’m relatively unimportant to people I cared about a lot is disagreeable but at least liberating. I can dispense with a lot of tiring attempts to Do The Right Thing and Be A Good Friend and do as they do with me: enjoy them when they’re entertaining and avoid them when they aren’t. This is the meaning of friendship in the local dialect, which I mistranslated for my own reasons.
Replacing unavailable intimacy with overrated friendship was a necessary error. Even good friends aren’t family or lovers. As an outsider in a group that celebrated the no-obligations flexibility of coffee-house tables as an ideal, I wasn’t going to find too many of those friends anyway.
I’m still pretty upset about some of my discoveries lately, but not fatally. It’ll stop being important to me as time goes by. And fair weather isn’t a bad time to shoot the shit on a patio, with whomever shows up and decides I’ll do for an hour or two.
Failing that I can just leave the headphones on more often.
Be My Blog 
A little drunk, forgiveness please.
It seems so ridiculous after some time away, I wonder why I kept at it.
I had spent years with these people. One assumes that the Big Things In Life might have been shared at some point, but generally no. All recycled materials, inside jokes, digs at the new people, pun games and movie quotes… These people that I thought were friends were just other actors in a silly little sitcom. We all had our roles, anybody that went beyond their would get immediately ostracized. Friendships were forgotten once it got too uncomfortable.
THIS DOES NOT A FRIENDSHIP MAKE. It’s a motherfucking farce.
Yet I still love everybody from the table. When some people come up I find some trouble trying to think of things to say outside of the ‘hey what’s new at Diedrichs’ stuff, but I still have a weird bond perhaps out of familiarity, like a cousin that shows up every several years that I automatically honor because of shared blood. I find it odd that I’d jump in front of a train for some people when all I know about them is what might have popped into conversation between the regular scripted exchanges.
Now that I’ve been away for so long I have trouble believing that anybody remembers me, the moody fella from a few seasons ago. It hurts. It hurts a lot.
My basic idea of friendship was built at Diedrichs. I had two friends before Dublin, was plucked from the friends I knew in Dublin after a few years, met some folks at the cafe by my school and stayed there for a while. Moved away and all my friends turned out to be acquaintances. I really don’t know if my experience is at all normal, it makes me wonder if there is a point to making friends at all if it only serves to pass the time.
Blah, The Pr0ks are in town which means I’ve been drinking. Sorry if I puked in your journal.
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Re: A little drunk, forgiveness please.
no puke there, just honesty. and you’re right. and you said the same thing I did, just better.
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