The Disingenuous Populace

I find it really fucking obnoxious how disingenuine most people are. Every day we completely fail to engage each other on a level that appreciates, respects, and honors our shared humanity. This creates a barrier very few people manage to permeate, like a giant piece of cling-film forever separating our true identities from each other.

Its obnoxious for me because it makes it fucking hard if not impossible for me to be genuine with them out of fear of scaring them out of their fucking minds. I'm constantly holding back and that is what is so obnoxious. However, whatever it is for me, I see it as being destructive for so many other people. I can list a number of men and women I see letting their lives slip away because nobody ever reached out and touched them. Trapped in loveless relationships, surrounded by family built on artificial ceremony, ritual, and the auspices of obligatory congenial feelings they seem to me adrift on the sea of reality utterly unaware what it can truly be like to live.

Has anyone ever found a common salve that can bring people out of their shells? Art can inspire us to reach for it, but most often the best artist is the tortured artist and they indeed have some unique perspective on the isolation that is worse, is even more wretched. I mean, really, what the fuck kind of emotional experience does one need to have to cut ones own fucking ear off? I mean holy shit.

I could drive this opinion piece towards sex and sexuality which is where I think we all really tend to fuck each other metaphorically and the key element that has made every threesome we've done to be haunted with a tinge of vapid abandonment, but I don't want to get into that now. What I do want to discuss is this guy I know. He's kind of intellectually ...well, not slow. He's got a degree and some formal, complicated, scientific training. But he's just totally out of the loop in social skills. Utterly ungraceful in any community setting. He has the occasional amusing observation but typically butchers the fuck out of its delivery. And if he does get a laugh expect to hear it over and over again.

Most people have abandoned him socially. I have not. It drives my wife nuts as she has no tolerance for him - I mean he broke into ancient role playing game anecdotes within 30 seconds of coming over tonight - and she wonders why I put up with him. Nobody else does. And the guy used to leech off me for social interaction. He's since moved away (back to visit his family this weekend, see) and is a whole lot easier to bear these days but she still doesn't think I should bother with keeping the friendship going.

But with him I can be totally genuine and not worry for a second about his reaction. I can be completely honest because he would never, ever reject me. I don't think he sees me doing it, because it comes so naturally and I don't make a spectacle of it, but it is so fucking refreshing to talk to him as it is a totally open field to say whatever the fuck I feel like, share whatever it is I'm thinking, because he would never undermine me, criticize me, or sabotage me.

He also never challenges me which is a little dull, but that's ok. He is a really good friend that nobody understands why I tolerate and this is why. I need to keep him away from my other friends, and that's ok to, because I couldn't be with them the way I am with him.

So if you know any anime nerds with no social skills and no friends try hanging out with them, the relationship can actually be rewarding in ways impossible to find with other people. But...what if I met cool, interesting people who I could be open with? Well I'm starting to believe those fuckers just don't exist.