(Dr.) Spendlove

Sometimes we need our lives to be free of complexity. No nonsense. Good fun. Intelligent conversation. Or random, far from intelligent conversation. Sometimes one needs to be oneself and sometimes one needs to be able to be anybody but oneself.

Shantell and I have studied infrequently and spent many a night sharing our disparaging love woes. Mixed up hearts and mixed up minds make for fantastic conversation and aided with the power of wine, conversation is inevitably good. I once saw a horror film, Paranormal Activity, alone. There was one other person in the theatre, an old man with a bucket of popcorn big enough for a family, a soda large enough to fuel a bus, and a box of candy hidden beneath his battered old fedora. I was tense and nervous, the armrests my only relief of tension beneath my clasped fingers. After the movie Shantell and I met up to study, she confessed that she’d never seen a movie alone. This shocked me, but made complete sense. Most people see movies on dates, or with groups of friends, somehow movies are a social activity. Or perhaps they’re easier to accept than two hours of awkward social inactivity at a restaurant or in someone’s living room with flat Coca-Colas. She told me I need never see a film alone, if I had no date or otherwise found myself in complete solitude, she was only a phone’s extended reach away. Today, after a tough day of study, attendance, exertion—too much reality for an artist—I needed escape. I needed the $10.50 ticket to another world, legally. And Shantell, the accompanying movie-goer she is, was down.

Perhaps the reason we get along is due to a lack of sexual tension. When I met Shantell her limbs were tangled in a dense affair (whose aren’t really?) and so mine were on their way. The mating game was suspended and friendship sprouted in its place. Stress-free, one might deem our relationship. Free from the boundaries of scattered emotions and complicated misunderstandings. What things we do disagree on blow over our heads like snowflakes in the wind. We are friends of the easy sort. We can discuss without consequence the intricate details of the world of love, as if what we’re saying we’re not really saying, but only implying. As if at any moment one of us could say, “Ha, just kidding! I never touched him!” and we would laugh off the entire conversation and continue our lives as if the molestation of the heart we’d just discussed was a story and nothing more.

Shantell was a gift from another friend, you might say. Kimberly, a deserter some would say; a lover of adventure and seeker of better things, others might say, introduced me to Shantell. You see they’re related and before Kimberly packed her bags and dove into the Californian metropolis, she introduced me to Shantell so that I wouldn’t be left alone in the cold Pacific Northwest. This isn’t to say Kimberly was my only friend, but it is to say she is a very valuable friend. Like Shantell. The kind of friend one needs, devoid of complication. Of course, I’m exaggerating, if the person in question is in fact human, they’re not devoid of complication. But something about the friendship I’ve shared with these two is both safe and comfortable.

The thing about being a writer is that there are things you must write. Meditations one sits on that must be manifested in the written word. The thing about social writers is that much of this is often related to people the writer knows directly. And so these meditations, lest the writer choose to change names and the like, become a sort of test. A test of friendship, or possibly a validity of said friendship. Fortunately the meditation set before you isn’t much of a revealing or embarrassing one, but there’s still the potential for disagreement. I might find that within a couple hours of submitting this my inbox has two horribly disgruntled emails from Kimberly and Shantell with elaborate details of my misinterpretations and daft assumptions, but this really would discount a good deal of my previous assertions. Precisely why these two girls are my friends are because, if I did receive said emails from them, I would be quite deserving. I would have been an obvious asshole who overstepped his boundaries. Either that or Shantell was listening to Lady Gaga or Britney too loudly as she read this and took their anti-man pop messages a little too seriously. Or maybe Kimberly was placing an order in a catalog and, disinterested in her reading, mistook me for claiming that I now liked Shantell more than her. But here’s the thing about these two: at the briefest of glances they may seem to belong to one of many all-too-commonly applied stereotypes (I confess I was guilty of making completely misguided first impressions of the both of them), but they’re so far from belonging to any of them. Each of them has this view of the world. This view so terribly unique from everyone else’s. One might mistake their interest for inattention, their attention for interest, one might see many things in these girls at first but certainly, one does not see who they truly are. And to claim I truly know either of them would be to claim too much.

I know this much: first impressions are bullshit and good friends are damn invaluable. Moral explicitly stated; time well spent.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 12:30 am and is filed under meditations, philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.