Today was great fun. Brian, Zero, and I went to Arden Fair to see a special showing of the amazing cult film Repo-Man. Brian and Zero hadn’t seen it, and they loved it.
After that we got awesome yogurt at Big Spoon and went back to Brian’s house to munch on burritos and watch Family Guy and South Park.
Afterwards, Brian had worked up the courage to tell me that he was giving Johnny “another chance.”
This is break up number four, by the way.
Zero and I had a nice long discussion about the matter to try to clear the air. I told him that I had lost nearly all my respect for him in continuing this charade. I point-blank asked him what he got out of the relationship. He had no answer for me.
And the weird thing was, Brian told me that nearly all of their fights had been about me. Johnny being jealous of our friendship (way to take a page from the Allen playbook, look how that one played out). The thing Johnny doesn’t get is that for people like us, just getting along is easy. We’re laid-back, easygoing people. Yes, we get stressed and have bad days but really, a night like tonight is one I’d like to have every night. Friendship means laughter, sharing experiences, being there for each other.
All Johnny can do is imagine how slighted he is by these cruel people he doesn’t understand. The thing is, if he wasn’t treating one of my best friends like a doormat, I would probably be trying to get to know him better. I enabled that whole visit where Brian and I basically walked to his house from the Amtrak station…but most of all, I’m sick of Brian’s life being turned wholesale into a fucking telenovela.
Brian is an awesome, multifaceted person and deserves better than to prostrate himself for a self-serving, airheaded egomaniac. As we were talking, it was eerie the parallels between Johnny and Terry. These are the kind of people that our morally and intellectually bankrupt society shits out. People with no grounding in philosophy or literature to problem-solve their way out of a paper bag, chock-full of emotions but no sensible rubrick on which to act on them. Tawdry, predictable taste has a strong correlation with a love for melodrama.
I don’t mean to assassinate Johnny’s character (he’s done a swimming job of that already), but let’s face it, he is just not emotionally mature enough to date Brian. And if you know Brian, that should freak you out.
Brian, Zero, and I don’t have to be on the train to crazy town every five minutes to get our rocks off. We had so many moments of just paralyzing laughter tonight, I can’t see what Brian gleans out of fight after fight after fight.
Actually, I do see what he gets out of it. I see it because I was in a relationship just like it. We’ve all had a relationship like that. Making the person who is nice to you a separate person from the person that is mean to you. It’s one of the most obvious signs of an abusive relationship. I took human sexuality. I know this shit.
And the strange thing is, it’s Brian that’s abusing itself. He allows Johnny to be rude to him, to belittle him, to belittle his interests, his personality, his friends. In short, to make him have so little self-esteem that he can’t escape. It’s the first rule of abusive relationships.
It’s time for the self-abuse to stop. It was time like three weeks ago.
