huntersmencken

H.L. Mencken, meme hacking, postmoderism, orthodontia, worthy friends and adversaries--we've so many key memes in common that I bet your other readers aren't altogether privy to or necessarily into! I'll have to visit you here regularly.

The implications of this medium (is it a medium?) still blow my mind. How meetings occur and with whom--seemingly by chance alone.

Of course, you are commenting on a long, submerged story, involving an RL friend (who gave me this subscription). Only the tip of the berg shows here. He didn't like the way I was "acting" in my writing, when I thought I was complimenting his poems and engaging him. It is he who kicked me out of his "e-space." I still don't understand why, but it does have something to do with jealousy. I can't say more than that without betraying him to an extent I'm not willing to, even now.

So, I need my own space to sort out his decision, without his continuing to send me hurtful email every day, without his rubbing it in and simultaneously tuning me out.

I don't think it is fair that he blocks my email, you know. And so I falter between patience on some days, and anger on others. But, what it comes down to is that he says I "mythologized" him and our "friendship" in the first place and he doesn't want anything to do with me, really. He isn't willing that I speak with my own voice in his presence. So, it really is a matter of his intolerance, not mine. Sometimes there is no choice. It isn't my baby to throw out with the bath water or to keep clean. All I can do is get my own head together about what is essentially his choice and move on.

This year I do keep coming to these sorts of impasses with supposed friends. I have to decide whether I'm willing to keep courting friendship with such continually reduced expectations and within such narrow confines of voice, or whether I'm better off to have out with honesty, my watchword, and accept that relationships don't last forever. Is friendship not founded on open exchange still friendship?

I'm a person who does "dig deep." Too deep. That is the very thing that annoys this person. So, the flick off of the switch you are seeing on my blog is a rhetorical fiat. It isn't my nature to cut. Never to cut off, preempt. I'm just too bewildered now . . . and his one-way trafficking in hurtful words isn't illuminating me.

I guess you are telling me that riding out chaos can lead to interesting, unexpected things. True, if one can meantime stand the pain. I've known this person since the early 1990s, and this conflict won't die. I'm pretty cowardly about adventures based on pain.