Monday, September 01, 2008

AND HERE'S ANOTHER THING...

I have always tried to be supportive of my BlogBrothers, if only because they were so supportive of me when I really needed support and attention. But recently, I echoed back a cranky remark of the JazzMan’s, with the result, apparently, that he almost gave up on his blog. That was not, as @#$%-ing usual, what I meant. At all. The JazzMan wrote:

I feel so completely alienated from everyone and everything. As I knew would happen, the after shocks of last night are hitting me. I am surrounded by all these people--people that are supposedly friends--and I am thinking--you have no idea what I did last night. But I didn't belong there. Mrs BB--she belongs there. She was brilliant-- dancing away, having a fantastic time. I envy her ease, her natural sociability.

Oh, I do a good imitation of it. I could even have danced--and would have done a good act. But that is all it is--an act. It would have been a performance, not for my benefit, but for the benefit of others--well, given the atrocious way in which I dance, perhaps 'benefit' is over-egging it. And it makes you think--if a party like that doesn't make you happy, then what the fuck will? And then you start to think, have you ever been happy?

Can you remember a time in your life when you could say you were truly happy-- truly at ease with yourself. And there have been times-- my honeymoon (ooooo, the irony) was idyllic. Our early marriage was pretty fantastic I seem to remember--not so the later stages. But that was a long, long time ago. Have I been happy recently? Fuck no. I have had moments of happiness--but that is a very different thing to being happy.


I think that there are some people who are intrinsically happy--that happiness is a natural state for them--their default position. And conversely there are people whose default state is "not-happy" which doesn't quite equal unhappy--it is a negative state, one that exists between the other two states. And then there are people whose default state is unhappiness. These are people who know happiness as a temporary thing, something that momentarily lifts the glooom, but it is transitory.
I think there are a very large number of people for whom that is their normal state. And I think I am one of them. Life truly is a bitch and then you die.

I have posted [probably too] often that IMOHO, unless they are Smurfs, people who assume that happiness—the moments when everything lines up and goes well—is normal, are living in a dream world. Life is full of suffering, and when it recedes, for however long, it is a gift, what people in former times called “grace.” “Happiness” is by nature transitory. But I didn’t want to weigh in with that. That, I thought, would have been hurtful. Oh, well. It was obviously not one of my better days, because what I actually wrote was:

Life may or may not be a bitch until you die, but you are beginning to sound like you're becoming one. Lighten up, dude.

OK, it was flip. It wasn't meant to be flip, but I know only too well how much it hurts when people overlook your suffering to focus on something else. Hurting someone else who is here in the same small, painful boat with the rest of us is something “I would never do.” [Isn’t it something most of us “would never do?] I of all people should not have been flip with another person’s suffering.

"Mea culpa—mea maxima culpa": guilty as charged, and then some. I was not trying to knock the JazzMan down, but to ask him to look up; it just came out all wrong. But I was really unprepared for what followed:


I have just read the comment that someone (T@C) wrote on my blog. I am really pissed off frankly. I was very tempted to delete it--but that is wrong, you can't go around just deleting stuff you don't like. So I am becoming a bitch am I? I need to lighten up. Funny, someone else told me that. Maybe it is true--in fact there is no maybe about it - I do need to lighten up. If only I had thought of that. After all what the hell have I got to be depressed about? My life is a bowl of cherries. FFS if I can't be miserable and curmudgeonly here on my self-indulgent misery fest, then where on earth can I be?

And then:

I nearly gave this blog up--but no, here I am. Why did I give it up? Funny how one comment from some one can change your whole outlook--or rather nearly change it. It was that bitchy comment from T@C--I really don't need to take grief here on this blog. This blog is for one purpose, and one purpose alone. It is for me. It is a repository of all of the evils in the world, a place I can rail against the injustices, where I can bathe in self-pity. It is, what my one-time "friend" Georgia described as "a self-indulgent misery-fest". If you don't like it, then fuck off. No one makes you read it. Just keep your insults to yourself please.

So, what do you do, if you’ve been clumsy and stupid but hadn’t meant to be? I’d thought I’d apologize.

Jazz:

"Free advice" is worth exactly what you pay for it. So feel free to delete any comment of mine that irritates you. Hey, deleting a comment is a pretty mild way of expressing anger. Why not "just do it?"


All I was trying to say was that until you opened the door a crack, no good times were going to be able to get in. That's all. Just leave the good things a little wiggle room.
Read a psalm: when things are shitty, prepare for the good times; when times are good, remember shit is just around the corner.

T@C

Here’s the problem: first of all, blog comments are at least as open to misinterpretation and too-hasty use of the “submit” button as e-mail. If I had thought for a moment, I might have seen that my attempt to turn a bad mood with humor was pretty much bound to fail—it works when the bad mood is your own, but not particularly well when it isn’t.

Then, saying what you meant after you have said what you said that hurt someone’s feelings might be said to define “shutting the barn door after the horse is gone.” I think this is what happens when you forget the difference between having been somewhere and actually being there. And it only now occurs to me that I failed to say the only thing that might actually have made a difference: “I’m sorry.”

So, here we are: I’m sorry.
C

1 comment:

  1. Ooops you really stepped into it! I suspect you may have that blunt sense of humor that can often offend some people. Start an email dialog with this person if you can and just in plain english, no double meanings or beating around the bush, make it clear to him you are on his side, sounds like he needs a friend.
    Even sweet little me got off on the wrong foot with another blogger and I really hurt his feelings, turns out he was actually a very nice guy, it was all a misunderstanding and after we became good friends, even chatting off and on, so we can all put our foot in it at times.

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