: Kind of sad but kind of not. An old friend I have known for 35 years fucked up his life exactly the way I told him he was fucking up his life back then and how it was going to turn out if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing with the attitude he had. Well, he’s 60 at the end of the year, and it’s one of those cases where I quip but am serious that I hate being right so much. He is in a bad, bad spot that nobody can help him with. Actively burned too many bridges, he did, some of them…
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…even gleefully. That wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t been the wrong ones to burn, which means that, yes, he kept traveling on the ones lead him to where he is now. All of those “friends” were playing but according to the trick, just “living life as it came at them”, i.e., fake AF for fun and profit. Truly I hate it for him. It’s a real tragedy because he wasn’t brought up the way he is, quite the opposite. He is where he is because he rebelled so hard against his parents.
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I do know the many, many factors that have gone into it, since his young childhood. He and I and his family and I were very close for a very long time. To greatly oversimplify but still be absolutely spot on, He made generally purely emotional decisions, almost all of which were bad for him, and he used his genuinely formidable intelligence to rationalize, played rhetorical games to be correct. Emotional dysregulation and self-deception doesn’t get the credit they deserve.
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I’m quite worried about him, as are a number of us old friends of his. I mean the ones of whoever left anyway. None of us are in positions to help him, sadly.
Just as sadly, he’s not the only old friend of mine that such a situation has overcome. You can only scheme and slide and squeak your way out of things for so long until you’ve really just booked yourself so far in there’s barely enough room to breathe. My late father found that out a few years before he died. My ex…
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… Charlie found that out about the time she turned 35. My late friend Joe found that out about four years before he died two years ago at 49. The late Melvin Roberts, an attorney and scumbag in my hometown, learned that ride around the time his most recent victim/girlfriend was murdering him.
Some people wind up alone just because that’s the way things work out. Some people wind up alone by their own design, however inadvertent.
Just a thought this PM. 🤷♂️