Thursday, March 04, 2004
Past imperfect, Part 1
Hi. Yeah, I've been away for awhile. The reasons aren't important, although you probably can guess them. I'll try to do better, but I make no promises.
Speaking of doing better ....
Lots of people blog about how cool they are. In a way, I've even done some of that. But I've also pondered using this blog as a place to talk about how UNcool I sometimes have been -- and not just uncool, but wrong -- evil, even. Not Saddam evil; more like pure, unprovoked mean. I'm not religious, so this blog will have to do for a confessional.
We all do stupid things to one another when we're kids, and I'm giving myself a pass on that. I'm going after the stuff I did that 1) truly hurt someone and 2) I should have known better than to do. And the first such episode I can recall clearly happened in seventh grade.
To set the scene: Seventh grade back then was not the middle year of middle school, it was the first year of junior high. Seventh graders were at the bottom of the food chain, the shitty end of the stick. Worse, up until then, school had been pretty much all about the academics, with the occasional episode of getting your ass kicked by one or the other neighborhood bully. In seventh grade, not only did other things matter, but in many ways and on many days they mattered more. Then there was that whole puberty thing, which was particularly bad for those of us, who, like me, hadn't yet hit it before being forced to disrobe in the locker room when almost every other guy in phys ed obviously had. You can tell stories about girls you've been with, but, dude, the baby-smooth mons pubis does not lie.
All of which is to say that even in a roiling sea of insecurity, I stood out. Explanation. Context. Not excuse.
Our story begins when, for grins, I submitted a parody of a Christmas carol to the December issue of the student newspaper. After the Christmas holidays I was approached by a guy who said he had admired the parody. We talked. We seemed to share tastes in music. That was a good thing. He had a crush on one of the girls on the public-TV show "Zoom!" to the extent that he serially wrote this girl letters. Not so good.
Still, at a time when my neighborhood friends seemed to be developing other interests (read: other friends), I became friends with this guy. If you had asked me at the time, or even years later, I'd have said it just happened. But later still, I am better able to identify some of the dynamics, perhaps the most important of which was that he needed me as a friend even worse than I needed him.
And so we got together after school sometimes, or on weekends, and this went on through the school year and summer vacation. But by the following fall, a couple of things had happened. First, I had made other friends of my own, while he, by and large, had not. Second, he was doing something that, in hindsight, I realize was very courageous, but which I thought at the time was just plain stupid: He was trying to learn a musical instrument from scratch, whereas most of us in the band were entering our fourth or fifth year of instruction on our respective instruments. Thus, inevitably, he would make many obvious mistakes in front of the class (His instrument was not one of the quieter ones.), which prompted our classmates to heap abuse upon him. Third, and most tragically, his mother had made him a fashion victim. He looked gay, and not in the hip, cool, Queer-Eye style of the 21st century. He looked stupid, and quite possibly homosexual, when neither quality was anywhere near as openly common, let alone popular, as it is now.
The predators in the roiling sea of insecurity sensed vulnerability ... and attacked. And, to my shame, I joined them.
I'm not saying I had any obligation to continue to be close friends with the guy. I don't believe that now and didn't believe that then. But I had, at the least, an obligation not to turn on him myself in the hopes that my own predatory behavior would suffice to steer the predators away from me. Yet I was perfectly happy to feed this guy to them if it meant I got away from them, even for a while.
Coincidentally, I just ran across an article by Matt Taibbi in the New York Press that contains a relevant phrase. This is totally out of context -- the article is about the beating that Rep. Dennis Kucinich has taken in the mainstream media as a candidate for president -- and yet the passage applies:
My friend was neither fat nor ugly, but he was weak, earnest, sincere and emotionally vulnerable -- all characteristics I saw in myself, and despised. So I joined in the "kidding" (irony quotes intentional), although at least I never actually tried to trip him or do the even worse things that some did.
And you know what? The guy stayed friends with me. All the way through junior high. All the way through high school.
That fact appalls me -- both for what it says about me and what it says about what his life must have been like.
And it would be nice to say that I got out of that situation with nothing but a guilty conscience, but that's not what happened.
Around the occasion of my high school class's 15th-anniversary reunion (which I didn't attend because of previous vacation plans), he called to let me know what-all was going on with the reunion. Then he said, "Let me ask you something."
Go ahead, I said.
"Why did we go from being such good friends to you picking on me so much? I was never surprised when people like [Classic Asshole] and [Classic Asshole's sycophantic hanger-on] did it, but why you? What did I ever do to you?"
I could have told him the truth. I could have said, "A., I turned on you because you exhibited all the traits and qualities I hated and feared in myself and because I was too afraid that if I didn't, the people who made your life so miserable would have done the same to me. I didn't have the courage of my own personality and convictions. I was, in short, a chickenshit. And I'm sorry."
But I didn't do that. The best I could muster was a half-hearted, "Well, I really don't know. All I can say is I did a lot of things back then that I'm not proud of."
His silence spoke volumes.
Speaking of doing better ....
Lots of people blog about how cool they are. In a way, I've even done some of that. But I've also pondered using this blog as a place to talk about how UNcool I sometimes have been -- and not just uncool, but wrong -- evil, even. Not Saddam evil; more like pure, unprovoked mean. I'm not religious, so this blog will have to do for a confessional.
We all do stupid things to one another when we're kids, and I'm giving myself a pass on that. I'm going after the stuff I did that 1) truly hurt someone and 2) I should have known better than to do. And the first such episode I can recall clearly happened in seventh grade.
To set the scene: Seventh grade back then was not the middle year of middle school, it was the first year of junior high. Seventh graders were at the bottom of the food chain, the shitty end of the stick. Worse, up until then, school had been pretty much all about the academics, with the occasional episode of getting your ass kicked by one or the other neighborhood bully. In seventh grade, not only did other things matter, but in many ways and on many days they mattered more. Then there was that whole puberty thing, which was particularly bad for those of us, who, like me, hadn't yet hit it before being forced to disrobe in the locker room when almost every other guy in phys ed obviously had. You can tell stories about girls you've been with, but, dude, the baby-smooth mons pubis does not lie.
All of which is to say that even in a roiling sea of insecurity, I stood out. Explanation. Context. Not excuse.
Our story begins when, for grins, I submitted a parody of a Christmas carol to the December issue of the student newspaper. After the Christmas holidays I was approached by a guy who said he had admired the parody. We talked. We seemed to share tastes in music. That was a good thing. He had a crush on one of the girls on the public-TV show "Zoom!" to the extent that he serially wrote this girl letters. Not so good.
Still, at a time when my neighborhood friends seemed to be developing other interests (read: other friends), I became friends with this guy. If you had asked me at the time, or even years later, I'd have said it just happened. But later still, I am better able to identify some of the dynamics, perhaps the most important of which was that he needed me as a friend even worse than I needed him.
And so we got together after school sometimes, or on weekends, and this went on through the school year and summer vacation. But by the following fall, a couple of things had happened. First, I had made other friends of my own, while he, by and large, had not. Second, he was doing something that, in hindsight, I realize was very courageous, but which I thought at the time was just plain stupid: He was trying to learn a musical instrument from scratch, whereas most of us in the band were entering our fourth or fifth year of instruction on our respective instruments. Thus, inevitably, he would make many obvious mistakes in front of the class (His instrument was not one of the quieter ones.), which prompted our classmates to heap abuse upon him. Third, and most tragically, his mother had made him a fashion victim. He looked gay, and not in the hip, cool, Queer-Eye style of the 21st century. He looked stupid, and quite possibly homosexual, when neither quality was anywhere near as openly common, let alone popular, as it is now.
The predators in the roiling sea of insecurity sensed vulnerability ... and attacked. And, to my shame, I joined them.
I'm not saying I had any obligation to continue to be close friends with the guy. I don't believe that now and didn't believe that then. But I had, at the least, an obligation not to turn on him myself in the hopes that my own predatory behavior would suffice to steer the predators away from me. Yet I was perfectly happy to feed this guy to them if it meant I got away from them, even for a while.
Coincidentally, I just ran across an article by Matt Taibbi in the New York Press that contains a relevant phrase. This is totally out of context -- the article is about the beating that Rep. Dennis Kucinich has taken in the mainstream media as a candidate for president -- and yet the passage applies:
... for the most part we laugh at the weak, the earnest, the sincere, the emotionally vulnerable. We laugh at people who are fat and ugly or who work as temps or at McDonald’s because none of us want to admit that we’re not the ripped six-pack guy on the cover of Men’s Health, or a member of the Sharper Image target market. We’re cowards, afraid of admitting to being who we are, and we laugh at people on the margins to avoid being identified as outsiders by the remorseless center.
My friend was neither fat nor ugly, but he was weak, earnest, sincere and emotionally vulnerable -- all characteristics I saw in myself, and despised. So I joined in the "kidding" (irony quotes intentional), although at least I never actually tried to trip him or do the even worse things that some did.
And you know what? The guy stayed friends with me. All the way through junior high. All the way through high school.
That fact appalls me -- both for what it says about me and what it says about what his life must have been like.
And it would be nice to say that I got out of that situation with nothing but a guilty conscience, but that's not what happened.
Around the occasion of my high school class's 15th-anniversary reunion (which I didn't attend because of previous vacation plans), he called to let me know what-all was going on with the reunion. Then he said, "Let me ask you something."
Go ahead, I said.
"Why did we go from being such good friends to you picking on me so much? I was never surprised when people like [Classic Asshole] and [Classic Asshole's sycophantic hanger-on] did it, but why you? What did I ever do to you?"
I could have told him the truth. I could have said, "A., I turned on you because you exhibited all the traits and qualities I hated and feared in myself and because I was too afraid that if I didn't, the people who made your life so miserable would have done the same to me. I didn't have the courage of my own personality and convictions. I was, in short, a chickenshit. And I'm sorry."
But I didn't do that. The best I could muster was a half-hearted, "Well, I really don't know. All I can say is I did a lot of things back then that I'm not proud of."
His silence spoke volumes.
