Over the years I have had a lot of trouble understanding friendship. I think part of it comes from me treating all social interaction as a contract on some level that other people are already supposed to understand the terms of. I was brought up to behave in certain ways and expect certain things that apparently very few families in the US observed even back then. Five decades into this whole thing I’m beginning to wonder if maybe my family and extended family were just barely on the other side of a cultural shift. On our side people are supposed to do things for the benefit of society and community and on the other side they do everything for themselves. That’s kind of tangential to the friendship thing but it factors into things at least in so far as it’s part of this unspoken contract I was made aware of and very few other people seem to have been. Which makes me think maybe we should not use unspoken contracts. Contracts should be said aloud so everyone can know the terms. But I digress. Back to the friendship thing. An interaction comes to mind and I’ll explain it from my perspective.
I once said something about Scott Kurtz (Another cartoonist) but I prefaced it with something to the effect of “We are not friends” and he took it to mean that we shared no connection and possibly our relationship was antagonistic. I was never able to explain my meaning to him because he never gave me the chance. I didn’t want to portray our relationship as two equals who had entered into the contract of friendship. I never hung out with him, or spoke at length with him. We are acquaintances, at best, and only ever online. He did me a favor many years ago that I have always appreciated, but I feel like describing him as a friend is overstepping the line. Part of this misunderstanding comes from Twitter not allowing you to fully explain what you mean by way of character limits. In retrospect I think that’s a feature not a bug. Social media is designed purposefully to cause problems because problems generate attention. Oh, I found the actual post:

I want to preface this by saying that
@pvponline isn’t my friend or anything,
he just gave me really good advice in passing once,
which was as follows:
If people want to reward you for your work, just fucking let them.
It’s some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

This was five years ago. In retrospect I think I could probably have just not expressed anything about the status of my not friendship with Scott. There’s just something in me that says you shouldn’t say, or even imply, that someone if your friend if they aren’t. On some level I feel like it’s a failing of English that we don’t have levels of friendship words, or more levels. Scott did me a solid once, he always treated me with respect even though he had no particular reason to, but he’s not going to invite me over for drinks or whatever. He has never followed me on any social media. He’s a peer, an associate, we were on good terms, but not friends, and making that distinction is important to me. I wouldn’t want people who think ill of me to think he was connected to me in a way he is not and in so doing bring some harm to him.

It is possible that I simply overthink things to a degree that borders on pathological.

In the present day I am certain Scott Kurtz would no want to be identified as my friend in any way. His interactions with others are more than enough proof of that. Regardless, he still gave me advice that saved my life on some level and I’m ALWAYS going to be appreciative of that even if I don’t feel like I can count him among my friends. Does that make sense at all? I kind of feel like if I was sitting next to my actual friend Joey he could give me some kind of a ruling on this, or at least some insight.

I’m sure that the comic’s constant focus on friendship and the intricacies of it stem in part from my own desire to understand it. I used to think that people were basically good and would just get along if outside forces didn’t cause misunderstandings and competition. I think now that some people are just born mean, or greedy, or whatever, and their inclusion in the mix throws things off. Some people are good and get twisted, some are mentally ill, and some just come out broken. It’s very difficult to figure out who is who out there in the world.

I’ve told this story before, but the character Wes is based very much on a real person. He was a dapper little man. Very friendly. Could talk to people easily. He was also a huge thief. He mistreated his wife. He was a trained EMT. Someone like that should not be placed in a position of trust. This combination of things that he slowly revealed to me made me dislike him very much. My efforts to thwart him made me a villain in the eyes of other people. I don’t regret standing in opposition of him even if people falsely believed that about me. I never had proof. Nothing solid that I could use to reveal his dastardly deeds. I only had the stories he told. Looking back I feel like it speaks very poorly of me that a person like that thought that I was a safe person to confide he foul deeds to. From the first time he regaled me with his tales of petty larceny I was waiting for a moment when I could use something he divulged to serve justice to him… It was all so galling. He didn’t even do it because he was in need. I can excuse some level of theft in desperate times. I’m capable of seeing the nuance of such an act, but he did it for sport. He did it because it made him happy to take advantage of others. At no time was that unclear. He had everything a man could want and it wasn’t enough. His wife, who was beautiful, wasn’t beautiful enough. His car wasn’t as expensive as the one he really wanted. In him was some deep vacuum that could never be filled with enough good fortune to satiate him.
All of the motivations that I gave to Wes as a character I made up. The person who inspired him didn’t seem to have any backstory that made him sympathetic at all. That seems to horrifying to me, so cartoonish that I couldn’t write a character like that in a way that I felt was convincing. I made Wes at least a little sympathetic just because the idea that people can simply be evil for the joy of it disturbs me.

Many of my friends have been unlikeable. Or at the very least they were when I met them. I think sometimes I am drawn to difficult people because they tend not to obfuscate who they are. That’s what makes them difficult to other people. I like people who are what they are on the surface and if you delve deeper you don’t find a secret garden of dark motives. One of the downsides of this is that many of my friends can’t be friends with each other because they are too similar and they fight. You can’t have a chill group hangout with 5 people who have maxed out their confidence stat. If they don’t thin exactly the same thing no one will back down because they have complete confidence in themselves. Two of my friends have nearly come to blows on several occasions because a situation arose where I could not keep them separated. On every occasion the only thing that stopped an altercation was basically my force of will, which is not ideal. Now all of these people live hundreds of miles apart so I don’t have to worry about that. Most of them don’t use social media because just like in real life a maxed out confidence stat causes problems. I wouldn’t use it either if it hadn’t become a part of my job. I’m on the verge of not using it anymore because it no longer seems to serve any purpose.

I’m not exactly sure why my friends are friends with me. I’m not particularly useful. If I had to guess it’s probably because I listen genuinely. In spite of all my flaws I always make time to be there if they need to talk. I guess that is useful now that I think about it. Texting made that a lot easier because people tend to get right to the point when they have to type things out. Only in times of most dire need are actual phone calls made. There have been a few times though. Divorce, death, and disaster. The three dees of the phone call.

I’m not a very attentive friend. If you don’t contact me I almost always will not contact you. If you contact me though I’ll pick back up exactly where we left off. My strange sense of time makes it seem like we just talked by my perspective. Even though the logical part of my brain says it’s been 5 years. I’m told not everyone is like that. I’m pretty sure not everyone is anything. I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.

No amount of explaining can make a lie the truth. The sun is the sun and will never be the moon. Hopefully I will be back on Wednesday with more comic. Mom has 3 more radiation things to do this week, so I’ll be alone to work for several hour before she or dad will need my help. Even so, I hope some force of good will ward off further disaster.

Until next time, protect your chaos emeralds.

3039 Just A Helpful Guy.

Links