Proverbs 12, Verse 5
"A good man's mind is filled with honest thoughts;
an evil man's mind is crammed with lies."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
It's funny how ideas evolve over time. I can remember back when being "good friends" with someone meant that, when you had dinner at their house on Friday night and his father went around the table and kissed everyone on the top of the head, that he kissed you, too. Later, being good friends with someone meant that you got invited to the sleepover where Cinemax softcore would be showing on the extravagantly-sized basement TV. For years, we didn't have a TV in our basement. We had shuffleboard. Because of this, and other factors, I knew I had to work an angle or two in order that I might secure a friend or two.
So I decided, pretty early on, to be interesting.
I would have opinions that were outside of the norm, I would spout invective and slander, I would make shocking remarks and comments of questionable taste. People, I figured, would be interested by someone who said interesting things, especially things he had no business saying. You know, as a nine-year-old.
When I was very young, I learned that I could make my barber double over in paroxysms of laughter by imitating Pee Wee Herman, Moe Howard, and the incompetent Yugoslavian shampoo girl that he had recently fired. She barely spoke English, and she would mutter what I guess she thought was casual conversation at customers in her incomprehensible, garbled clamor as she quite literally climbed on top of them and all over them while she struggled to hold the sink nozzle and control the pace of the shampoo bottle's output. I thought perhaps my impressions, or international and neighborhood celebrities, could win me over friends.
Maybe I was right-- I don't know.
Something I'm only recently realizing is that what friendship is, by and large, if it's anything, is the act of getting close enough to someone such that they let their guard down enough to share with you what they really think. You know what I mean: what they really think.
Really.
Those quiet 1am conversations where truths are revealed due to casual, un-careful openness. To be close enough to not be afraid, or what they might say or think or tell. To be able to look someone in the eyes over a plate of questionable food at a suspect diner and lay your heart bare as if it were an item on the greasy, laminated menu. To not hear qualified thoughts or apologies in advance, or caveats or political correctness.
Goddamned political correctness.
Sure, you can never actually know someone, but I think it is possible, with a friend, a real, true friend, to know at least what he or she thinks about some things. Their real and true opinions, and to see them, in some moment or other, as other people cannot: stripped of pretense and image-crafting. The Unstagram. And I don't know how many people you get a shot at having that with over the course of a relatively appropriate lifespan-- four? One? I suppose, if you're terrifyingly unlucky, you never know what that's like. I'm definitely fortunate to be able to say that I've had it with one person, and lost it. I may have it with one or two others, sometimes I'm not sure. And I guess the other question that makes me slightly uncomfortable is: does anybody have it with me?
I mean, okay, if you look at the 97 posts on this blog, it looks like I'm a pretty straight up person, I kind of put it all out there in a way that looks and smells very much like I don't give a shit who thinks what about it. But I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's who I am. What if this is all just a bunch of nonsense I spew and it feel like the real thing at the moment but then I go to sleep and wake up and it's all different, that everything I really am is locked away so deep inside even I don't know it's there.
We're so careful. So afraid. We think that, if someone tries too hard to get to know us that we'll break. And maybe that's true. But I love knowing the truth-- that moment when someone leans across the table and whispers, "Psst-- come here. No, closer," because they're going to tell me something real, and I think in this plastic, photo-shopped, status update time we're all drooling and desperate for something unlocked, something unguarded, something unedited, something breathtakingly real.
Ready, or not.
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