Sometimes You Just Want Someone to Slap You On the Ass

Josh Friedman, the screenwriter and author of “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing,” finally put up a post the other day after nearly a year of silence. He’s writing there, of course because a. he’s a writer and writers write and b. he’s on strike so he’s writing for free instead of for money. This is great news for free thinkers everywhere who like his point of view but don’t especially like mass communication media. His view from the picket line hit home for me because in talking about the Writers strike he touches on a universal truth of the human experience. While it ‘may be the dubious luxury of ordinary men’ it means death for guys like me; a death that, some days, doesn’t seem that far away.

I’ve found myself in the last couple of days writing inventory about current stuff surrounding my closest relationships. It seems to me that these relationships are more important to me than they are to the people I have them with. It seems that by letting my guard down I am forever placing myself in a position to be slapped, whether by my best friend who cancels plans with me to take a nap instead then calls me later to tell me he did something else with someone else and how horrible it was or a new friend saying I inspired him to try something new but leaving me to be the last to know.

“(W)hile I have had many suits in many forms over the years tell me to
figuratively fuck off as they mangled my screenplays, it is not til you
see that actual finger from an actual person do you realize how few
times in your adult life someone has actually told you, to quote the
great Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator: FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.

And I have to admit that it pleased me just a little because I’m tired of the polite and earnest way we get screwed by them every other day of the year and sometimes you just want someone to slap you on the ass and scream in your fucking ear.”

-Josh Friedman

I would simply add pull my hair to that list. I kind of like it. And the whole thing seems more honest than the lovely manners so many assholes in this world have.

I have really had it with shit like that, though. I am sick of feeling screwed, whether it is based on something real or based on something imagined. Probably, even though I’ve done and continue doing the work, I still feel that early recovery sensation of having my skin peeled off my body. And I wonder if God isn’t trying to show me something here, something I already know. Something my 4th step made abundantly, painfully clear. My primary character defect is that ‘I want to feel important.’ This if followed very closely by ‘I’m afraid to be alone’ and ‘I want to feel cared for.’ Of course all of these have important and factual roots in my childhood, roots that I struggle to forgive and struggle to overcome. It’s like the blackberry in my psyche; the Audry II of my soul. It’s a mean, green mother.

I don’t want to have to keep writing about this same defect forever and I’m becoming clear that I may perhaps require professional as well as spiritual help with this one. The only thing that disturbs me more that those defects is the way they make me respond. Every unintentional slight feels like a stab to the heart and I respond accordingly. Every discourtesy is a reason to end things and run away. Is it any wonder then that I fail utterly at relationships. The baggage I bring to the journey is beyond excess.

Even with that admission though, I cannot believe that the entire problem rests with me. They say we addicts bring out the bad in good people and the worst in bad people and that would imply that those people, good and bad, are also participating in some way and that though I have a significant part in the problem, the problem isn’t entirely mine. I am simply the one that is required to do something about it. Or die. It would be easier, I think, to handle an honest ‘fuck you’ than to discern it from a polite dismissal that feels like the whole thing rests with me. The only way I can think of to avoid the thing completely and not create new harms is to become a hermit. Hermitage doesn’t sound like a bad idea at the moment. (I mean, they have lovely things, lots of shiny stuff, and docents to show you about the place without having to have anything like a personal relationship. If a docent is rude you fire her and get a new one.)

It’s hard to make friends. It’s hard to be a friend. It’s hard to maintain friendships. I especially suck at it. The only way to avoid harming others some days seems to be to not have others in my life, to exercise the strategy I’ve always employed, running away. Yet that isn’t a solution to the character defect. Kind of fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t. Fear of fucking (literally) destroyed my sex life years and years ago. I wonder if it isn’t fear of fucking (figuratively) thats destroying my personal relationships now.