Saturday, October 07, 2006

My Friends are Jerks...

There is one thing I have learned about our society, and that is some people take themselves too damn seriously. I got some funny responses to my blog and then I also got some truly ridiculous responses. I was even accused of having "animus" towards women.

Even though I do know what that word means, it sounds like something Harry Potter would say in a magic spell. It doesn't belong in a critique of a silly blog called the "Fool's Crusade." Its some strange folk out there. I will post these responses next week because you wouldn't even believe how silly they were.

Anyways, I find myself missing my friends quite a bit. They are all spread out over the country and I don't make new friends easily. Mainly because I am surrounded by people who have no personality and cover that up with endless conversations about their bland children, or folks who talk about Jesus all the time, or folks who find ways to further segregate themselves away from the rest of society (black fraternity/sorority members, cops, military, and fake intellectuals).

So the pickings are slim for a dude who likes talking about politics, video games, breakfast cereals, and old TV theme songs. I believed I was alone in the world for many, many years, because even the dudes I grew up with were a bit too preoccupied with sports and fake gangsta life for me to share all my interests with.

I didn't really connect with other folks who shared my interests until I moved to Boston after undergrad. I will go on record to say that there are some great people in Boston, but the majority of the population are people who hate anything that isn't white. Even the black Bostonians hate everything non-white. Its the racial Twilight Zone of America. More on that in a future blog.

Anyways, while working at a Japanese animation spot and a comic book store while in grad school, I met a bunch of guys who are the coolest people I have ever known. Sure, most people would call them unrepentant geeks, but damn, if I would start singing the theme song to "One Day at a Time" those bastards would chime right in with me.

That's a damn rare thing.

I won't give you their real names, but I will start with a short rundown of their personalities and quirks --

BDB = Asian guy who loves Boston almost as much as I love Baltimore. Has a problem understanding how much Boston sucks as a city in terms of personality. BDB stands for Back Down Buddy, in the sense that he is that friend who pulls out of major plans at the last minute because he is afraid of his parents. Mind you, he is in his late 20s. Needs to get laid in this century.

August = Funny, white, yuppie guy like those dudes from the movie WALL STREET. Loves money. Talks about his conquests with women ad nauseum. Some of these stories are fabricated. I call him "august" because his best woman stories seem to happen in the month of August.

NoBankAccount = Good Salvadoran guy who has no bank account despite being in his mid-20s and this causes him lots of trouble whenever he needs to cash his paycheck. Spends about 60% of his income on video games and the like. Because of some issues growing up, NBA didn't learn the basics about how to conduct personal financial business. Things that should come to people immediately take about 3 months for NBA to process. While it doesn't really affect me in my personal life, it gets hard to make plans with a guy who may or may not have the money whenever you want to go out and have fun. Desperately needs to get laid on a regular basis.


Leech = I couldn't make up a name for this guy because that's his nickname. He got it because he never had any money, hung out at a comic book store for years living off the kindness of the employees. Great dude, but has a very unhealthy desire for young girls. I have tried to ween him off of this fetish, but I figure he will stop when he ends up in prison for statuatory rape sharing a cell with a guy who hates child molesters. Some people have to learn the hard way -- no pun intended.

JailHouseMike = One of the guys I grew up with. Love him like a brother. Problem is, he seems to have lost the ability to experience joy in his life. He was always a dour kind of guy, but if it doesn't relate to sports or disfunctional women, he ain't really interested. Recently, I became the potential godfather for his new son. This has changed a lot in his life, although he still doesn't get excited about much.

MovieUsher = Another guy I grew up with. He is probrably the closest of all of them to having my exact same personality. And for that reason, we have been at odds for quite a long time. MovieUsher is intelligent, funny, and hard working. But what separates us was my educational ambitions vs. his desire to have fun when graduating from high school. I went straight into undergrad, he spent that summer having sex with a girl everyone warned him about. So of course, she gets pregnant, and to this date, he hasn't earned a college degree. I only bring that up because he talked about it being a personal goal 15 years ago. We are all in our early 30s.

The Dreamer = I met this dude at Ithaca College. He is like a much more idealistic, bright-eyed, and naive version of myself. He is a very talented writer and he has the exact same taste in women as I do. Problem is, there was a point in time when I stopped being naive and idealistic and started to practice a cautious optimism that has served me very well in the last decade. The Dreamer still hasn't developed that necessary survival skill. So he jumps headlong into things under the umbrella of being "romantic" but careful examination reveals an overall laziness at attacking a situation from the most logical point of reference. Moved out to Arizona on a whim. Still out there comprising 25% of the black population of that state.

I do have quite a few women friends whom I haven't dated or slept with. But they usually get insecure boyfriends who have issues with them having a male friend so I don't push the issue too much and I hear from them about every 6-8 months when they break up with those losers.

But for all their quirks and percieved lunacies, I really love these people. Sadly, we are all over the country, so whenever I get to hang out with them, its an event and we try to bring the house down wherever we go. Problem is, the roof usually ends up on our collective heads.

No comments: