...and your enemies closer? Well, that's what the Godfather taught us. You may have seen how well it worked out for Michael Corleone. Not very, if you didn't see I or II.
But, that's the movies. In real life, we don't like our enemies to be close to us. This is because they are enemies and, since we don't like them, we don't want them around. Pretty simple. I don't hang around with my enemies and whenever they see me, they tell me to go away. They get very upset when I do not heed their warnings. Well, that's enemies for ya! That's just the way they are! Those damn enemies!
What if your friends treated you like that? Would you still consider them friends? Probably not.
But, what if your friends treated you like an enemy but did so under the guise of "friendship"? As in, "We love you but, you've made us mad and now we're going to say mean, hurtful things about you and you better take it because we're your friends!" That would be weird. A little incongruous. It would be worse if, while they stuck a knife in your back, they told you that someone else was going to stick a knife in your back but that THAT friend wouldn't really be your friend...
We all saw this sort of friendship unfold twice in one week with that group of friends know as "the regulars". Two of their friends had commited egregious acts against the regs. One fella, accused of being rather wordy in his posts, refused to take a verbal ass-whupping from a higher ranking reg because of his lengthy posts. One after another, other regs came to join the verbal beat-down of their friend. There is a pecking order. He went up against someone with more rank than him- someone who was more of a friend to the regs than he- and he had to pay the price for that. What are friends for, if not to remind you just how good of a friend you are?
A few days later, a young woman made the mistake of laughing at a post that your's truly had made. Dedicated non-readers of this blog know that me and the regs don't get along. Though they treat me like a friend... I am NOT their friend. To wit, when they fuck with me, we go to the mattresses. I know who my friends are and aren't.
So, when this young woman laughed at my post, it was the final straw for some of the leading regs. She had shown pro-ferrerman sentiment in the past, something TOTALLY against the rules of the regs. Independent thought is frowned upon by the regs. She had been warned before! She broke her "double-secret probabtion"! So, at the command of 3e (or perhaps higher{?}) hell was unleashed! It wasn't pretty. Their version of friendship never is. They have two speeds: AWESOME and HOW DARE YOU!
Non-readers, I am not a gang. An army of one maybe but, not a gang. My two best friends are women. One, whom I've know for a year now, is a former "innie", the hierarchy of the regulars. The other, was a regular poster on the threads until she too got the friendship treatment from the regs. I trust these two with my very life. We love and respect each other as real friends do. They "have my back" but also know that I can take care of myself. I don't DEMAND that my friends walk through doors that I choose to open. They know that there's nobody here that I can't handle. They are wise enough to question why I bother and friend enough not to harangue me for doing so. They counsel but they don't tell me what to do. They think for themselves so, it follows that I will think for myself as well. Wow. Independent thought! What a concept!
And it works. I'm very lucky. No gang affiliation. Just real friends.
FREEDOM!
2 comments:
Yeah, independent thought indeed.
You know I don't always agree with your choices, but that's my problem.
I could not respect anyone who bows down to pressure.
And I will never understand how cruel words are supposedly, what good friends do.
You forgot to mention that your friends are hot.
I think you raise a number of good points, Ferrerman. I, like Thingy, disagree with you sometimes. I really wish you would not have continued to engage the regs, but you already know that. I think you’ve done yourself a disservice by doing so, in fact.
I’m so sorry Roo had to go through that. I’m sorry things turned out the way they did for me as well. In any case, I don’t want to talk about topix anymore. It is time for me to turn the page.
My gmail account includes my full name and I did not want to create yet another email address just to post on here. So I created a blog http://homeforthoughts.blogspot.com/, which allows me to post on other people’s blogs using my yahoo email. I might do some posting and I might not. I did one post for now.
If anyone wants to visit (including the people from topix who don’t read your blog ;p) you are all welcome, but I don’t expect many will.
I make no promises that it will be interesting. No one will hurt my feelings if you don't want to visit. I don't have any aspirations that it will be a popular blog, nor is it my intent to make it one. I’m probably not going to share its existence with my IRL friends as well. So, it will probably be small. Also, people may not like it or I may get bored, so it may not be around that long anyway. I mostly created it so that I can post on blogs that do not allow anonymous comments.
It is a no drama zone, however. So, come one, come all, but I’d like to keep it nice and friendly there. I don’t want to have to abandon my own blog over drama nonsense.
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